Different Seasons
Stephen King
Contents
RITA HAYWORTH AND SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION
APT PUPIL
THE BODY
THE BREATHING METHOD
RITA HAYWORTH AND SHAWSHANK
REDEMPTION
There's a guy like me in every state and federal prison in America, I
guess-I'm the guy who can get it for you. Tailor-made cigarettes, a bag of
reefer, if you're partial to that, a bottle of brandy to celebrate your son or
daughter's high school graduation, or almost anything else within reason,
that is. It wasn't always that way. I came to Shawshank when I was just
twenty, and I am one of the few people in our happy little family who is
willing to own up to what he did. I committed murder. I put a large
insurance policy on my wife, who was three years older than I was, and
then I fixed the brakes of the Chevrolet coupe her father had given us as a
wedding present. It worked out exactly as I had planned, except I hadn't
planned on her stopping to pick up the neighbour woman and the neighbour
woman's infant son on the way down Castle Hill and into town. The brakes
let go and the car crashed through the bushes at the edge of the town
common, gathering speed. Bystanders said it must have been doing fifty or
better when it hit the base of the Civil War statue and burst into flames. I
also hadn't planned on getting caught, but caught I was. I got a season's pass
into this place. Maine has no death penalty, but the district attorney saw to it
that I was tried for all three deaths and given three life sentences, to run one
after the other. That fixed up any chance of parole I might have, for a long,
long time. The judge called what I had done 'a hideous, heinous crime', and
it was, but it is also in the past now. You can look it up in the yellowing
files of the Castle Rock Call, where the big headlines announcing my
conviction look sort of funny and antique next to the news of Hitler and
Mussolini and FDR's alphabet soup agencies.
Have I rehabilitated myself, you ask? I don't know what that word means,
at least as far as prisons and corrections go. I think it's a politician's word. It
may have some other meaning, and it may be that I will have a chance to
find out, but that is the future something cons teach themselves not to
think about. I was young, good-looking, and from the poor side of town. I
knocked up a pretty, sulky, headstrong girl who lived in one of the fine old
houses on Carbine Street. Her father was agreeable to the marriage if I
would take a job in the optical company he owned and 'work my way up'. I
found out that what he really had in mind was keeping me in his house and
under his thumb, like a disagreeable pet that has not quite been housebroken
and which may bite. Enough hate eventually piled up to cause me to do
what I did. Given a second chance I would not do it again, but I'm not sure
that means I am rehabilitated.
Anyway, it's not me I want to tell you about; I want to tell you about a
guy named Andy Dufresne. But before I can tell you about Andy, I have to
explain a few other things about myself. It won't take long.
As I said, I've been the guy who can get it for you here at Shawshank for
damn near forty years. And that doesn't just mean contraband items like
extra cigarettes or booze, although those items always top the list. But I've
gotten thousands of other items for men doing time here, some of them
perfectly legal yet hard to come by in a place where you've supposedly been
brought to be punished. There was one fellow who was in for raping a little
girl and exposing himself to dozens of others; I got him three pieces of pink
Vermont marble and he did three lovely sculptures out of them- a baby, a
boy of about twelve, and a bearded young man. He called them The Three
Ages of Jesus, and those pieces of sculpture are now in the parlour of a man
who used to be governor of this state. Or here's a name you may remember
if you grew up north of Massachusetts-Robert Alan Cote. In 1951 he tried
to rob the First Mercantile Bank of Mechanic Falls, and the hold-up turned
into a bloodbath-six dead in the end, two of them members of the gang,
three of them hostages, one of them a young state cop
who put his head up at the wrong time and got a bullet in the eye. Cote
had a penny collection. Naturally they weren't going to let him have it in
here, but with a little help from his mother and a middleman who used to
drive a laundry truck, I was able to get it to him. I told him, Bobby, you
must be crazy, wanting to have a coin collection in a stone hotel full of
thieves. He looked at me and smiled and said, I know where to keep them.
They'll be safe enough. Don't you worry. And he was right. Bobby Cote
died of a brain tumor in 1967, but that coin collection has never turned up.
I've gotten men chocolates on Valentine's Day; I got three of those green
milkshakes they serve at McDonald's around St Paddy's Day for a crazy
Irishman named O'Malley; I even arranged for a midnight showing of Deep
Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones for a party of twenty men who had
pooled their resources to rent the films although I ended up doing a week
in solitary for that little escapade. It's the risk you run when you're the guy
who can get it.
I've gotten reference books and fuck-books, joke novelties like
handbuzzers and itching powder, and on more than one occasion I've seen
that a long-timer has gotten a pair of panties from his wife or his girlfriend
and I guess you'll know what guys in here do with such items during the
long nights when time draws out like a blade. I don't get all those things
gratis, and for some items the price comes high. But I don't do it just for the
money; what good is money to me? I'm never going to own a Cadillac car
or fly off to Jamaica for two weeks in February. I do it for the same reason
that a good butcher will only sell you fresh meat: I got a reputation and I
want to keep it. The only two things I refuse to handle are guns and heavy
drugs. I won't help anyone kill himself or anyone else. I have enough killing
on my mind to last me a lifetime.
Yeah, I'm a regular Neiman-Marcus. And so when Andy Dufresne came
to me in 1949 and asked if I could smuggle Rita Hayworth into the prison
for him, I said it would be no problem at all. And it wasn't.
When Andy came to Shawshank in 1948, he was thirty years old. He was
a short neat little man with sandy hair and small, clever hands. He wore
gold-rimmed spectacles. His fingernails were always clipped, and they were
always clean. That's a funny thing to remember about a man, I suppose, but
it seems to sum Andy up for me. He always looked as if he should have
been wearing a tie. On the outside he had been a vice-president in the trust
department of a large Portland bank. Good work for a man as young as he
was, especially when you consider how conservative most banks are and
you have to multiply that conservatism by ten when you get up into New
England, where folks don't like to trust a man with their money unless he's
bald, limping, and constantly plucking at his pants to get his truss around
straight Andy was in for murdering his wife and her lover.
As I believe I have said, everyone in prison is an innocent man. Oh, they
read that scripture the way those holy rollers on TV read the Book of
Revelations. They were the victims of judges with hearts of stone and balls
to match, or incompetent lawyers, or police frame-ups, or bad luck. They
read the scripture, but you can see a different scripture in their faces. Most
cons are a low sort, no good to themselves or anyone else, and their worst
luck was that their mothers carried them to term. In all my years at
Shawshank, there have been less than ten men whom I believed when they
told me they were innocent Andy Dufresne was one of them, although I
only became convinced of his innocence over a period of years. If I had
been on the jury that heard his case in Portland Superior Court over six
stormy weeks in 1947-48, I would have voted to convict, too.
It was one hell of a case, all right; one of those juicy ones with all the
right elements. There was a beautiful girl with society connections (dead), a
local sports figure (also dead), and a prominent young businessman in the
dock. There was this, plus all the scandal the newspapers could hint at. The
prosecution had an open-and-shut case. The trial only lasted as long as it
did because the DA was planning to run for the US House of
Representatives and he wanted John Q Public to get a good long look at his
phiz. It was a crackerjack legal circus, with spectators getting in line at four
in the morning, despite the subzero temperatures, to assure themselves of a
seat.
The facts of the prosecution's case that Andy never contested were these:
That he had a wife, Linda Collins Dufresne; that in June of 1947 she had
expressed an interest in learning the game of golf at the Falmouth Hills
Country Club; that she did indeed take lessons for four months; that her
instructor was the Falmouth Hills golf pro, Glenn Quentin; that in late
August of 1947 Andy learned that Quentin and his wife had become lovers;
that Andy and Linda Dufresne argued bitterly on the afternoon of 10
September 1947; that the subject of their argument was her infidelity.
He testified that Linda professed to be glad he knew; the sneaking
around, she said, was distressing. She told Andy that she planned to obtain
a Reno divorce. Andy told her he would see her in hell before he would see
her in Reno. She went off to spend the night with Quentin in Quentin's
rented bungalow not far from the golf course. The next morning his
cleaning woman found both of them dead in bed. Each had been shot four
times.
It was that last fact that mitigated more against Andy than any of the
others. The DA with the political aspirations made a great deal of it in his
opening statement and his closing summation. Andrew Dufresne, he said,
was not a wronged husband seeking a hot-blooded revenge against his
cheating wife; that, the DA said, could be understood, if not condoned. But
this revenge had been of a much colder type. Consider! the DA thundered at
the jury. Four and four! Not six shots, but eight! He had fired the gun
empty and then stopped to reload so he could shoot each of them again!
FOUR FOR HIM AND FOUR FOR HER, the Portland Sun blared. The
Boston Register dubbed him The Even-Steven Killer.
A clerk from the Wise Pawnshop in Lewiston testified that he had sold a
six-shot.38 Police Special to Andrew Dufresne just two days before the
double murder. A bartender from the country club bar testified that Andy
had come in around seven o'clock on the evening of 10 September, had
tossed off three straight whiskeys in a twenty-minute period-when he got up
from the bar-stool he told the bartender that he was going up to Glenn
Quentin's house and he, the bartender, could 'read about the rest of it in the
papers'. Another clerk, this one from the Handy-Pik store a mile or so from
Quentin's house, told the court that Dufresne had come in around quarter to
nine on the same night. He purchased cigarettes, three quarts of beer, and
some dish-towels. The county medical examiner testified that Quentin and
the Dufresne woman had been killed between eleven p. m. and two a. m. on
the night of 10-11 September. The detective from the Attorney General's
office who had been in charge of the case testified that there was a turnout
less than seventy yards from the bungalow, and that on the afternoon of 11
September, three pieces of evidence had been removed from that turnout:
first item, two empty quart bottles of Narragansett Beer (with the
defendant's fingerprints on them); the second item, twelve cigarette ends
(all Kools, the defendant's brand); third item, a plaster moulage of a set of
tire tracks (exactly matching the tread-and-wear pattern of the tires on the
defendant's 1947 Plymouth).
In the living room of Quentin's bungalow, four dishtowels had been
found lying on the sofa. There were bullet-holes through them and powder-
burns on them.
The detective theorized (over the agonized objections of Andy's lawyer)
that the murderer had wrapped the towels around the muzzle of the murder-
weapon to muffle the sound of the gunshots. Andy Dufresne took the stand
in his own defence and told his story calmly, coolly, and dispassionately. He
said he had begun to hear distressing rumours about his wife and Glenn
Quentin as early as the last week in July. In August he had become
distressed enough to investigate a bit. On an evening when Linda was
supposed to have gone shopping in Portland after her tennis lesson, Andy
had followed her and Quentin to Quentin's one-story rented house
(inevitably dubbed 'the love-nest' by the papers). He had parked in the
turnout until Quentin drove her back to the country club where her car was
parked, about three hours later.
'Do you mean to tell this court that your wife did not recognize your
brand-new Plymouth sedan behind Quentin's car?' the DA asked him on
cross-examination. 'I swapped cars for the evening with a friend,' Andy
said, and this cool admission of how well-planned his investigation had
been did him no good at all in the eyes of the jury. After returning the
friend's car and picking up his own, he had gone home. Linda had been in
bed, reading a book. He asked her how her trip to Portland had been. She
replied that it had been fun, but she hadn't seen anything she liked well
enough to buy. That's when I knew for sure,' Andy told the breathless
spectators. He spoke in the same calm, remote voice in which he delivered
almost all of his testimony. 'What was your frame of mind in the seventeen
days between then and the night your wife was murdered?' Andy's lawyer
asked him.
'I was in great distress,' Andy said calmly, coldly. Like a man reciting a
shopping list he said that he had considered suicide, and had even gone so
far as to purchase a gun in Lewiston on 8 September.
His lawyer then invited him to tell the jury what had happened after his
wife left to meet Glenn Quentin on the night of the murders. Andy told
them and the impression he made was the worst possible.
I knew him for close to thirty years, and I can tell you he was the most
self-possessed man I've ever known. What was right with him he'd only
give you a little at a time. What was wrong with him he kept bottled up
inside. If he ever had a dark night of the soul, as some writer or other has
called it, you would never know. He was the type of man who, if he had
decided to commit suicide, would do it without leaving a note but not until
his affairs had been put neatly in order. If he had cried on the witness stand,
or if his voice had thickened and grown hesitant, even if he had gotten
yelling at that Washington-bound District Attorney, I don't believe he would
have gotten the life sentence he wound up with. Even if he had've he would
have been out on parole by 1954. But he told his story like a recording
machine, seeming to say to the jury: this is it. Take it or leave it. They left
it.
He said he was drunk that night, that he'd been more or less drunk since
24 August, and that he was a man who didn't handle his liquor very well. Of
course that by itself would have been hard for any jury to swallow. They
just couldn't see this coldly self-possessed young man in the neat double-
breasted three-piece woollen suit ever getting falling-down drunk over his
wife's sleazy little affair with some smalltown golf pro. I believed it because
I had a chance to watch Andy that those six men and six women didn't
have. Andy Dufresne took just four drinks a year all the time I knew him.
He would meet me in the exercise yard every year about a week before his
birthday and then again about two weeks before Christmas. On each
occasion he would arrange for a bottle of Jack Daniels. He bought it the
way most cons arrange to buy their stuff-the slave's wages they pay in here,
plus a little of his own. Up until 1965 what you got for your time was a
dime an hour. In '65 they raised it all the way
up to a quarter. My commission on liquor was and is ten per cent, and
when you add on that surcharge to the price of a fine sippin' whiskey like
the Black Jack, you get an idea of how many hours of Andy Dufresne's
sweat in the prison laundry was going to buy his four drinks a year.
On the morning of his birthday, 20 September, he would have himself a
big knock, and then he'd have another that night after lights out. The
following day he'd give the rest of the bottle back to me, and I would share
it around. As for the other bottle, he dealt himself one drink Christmas night
and another on New Year's Eve. Then that one would also come to me with
instructions to pass it on. Four drinks a year -and that is the behaviour of a
man who has been bitten hard by the bottle. Hard enough to draw blood. He
told the jury that on the night of the 10th he had been so drunk he could
only remember what had happened in little isolated snatches. He had gotten
drunk that afternoon-'I took on a double helping of Dutch courage' is how
he put it -before taking on Linda.
After she left to meet Quentin, he remembered deciding to confront them.
On the way to Quentin's bungalow, he swung into the country club for a
couple of quick ones. He could not, he said, remember telling the bartender
he could 'read about the rest of it in the papers', or saying anything to him at
all. He remembered buying beer in the Handy-Pik, but not the dishtowels.
'Why would I want dishtowels?' he asked, and one of the papers reported
that three of the lady jurors shuddered.
Later, much later, he speculated to me about the clerk who had testified
on the subject of those dishtoweis, and I think it's worth jotting down what
he said. 'Suppose that, during their search for witnesses,' Andy said one day
in the yard, 'they stumble on this fellow who sold me the beer that night. By
then three days have gone by. The facts of the case have been broadsided in
all the papers. Maybe they ganged up on the guy, five or six cops, plus the
dick from the attorney general's office, plus the DA's assistant. Memory is a
pretty subjective thing, Red. They could have started out with "Isn't it
possible that he purchased four or five dishtowels?" and worked their way
up from there. If enough people want you to remember something, that can
be a pretty powerful persuader.' I agreed that it could.
'But there's one even more powerful,' Andy went on in that musing way
of his. 'I think it's at least possible that he convinced himself. It was the
limelight. Reporters asking him questions, his picture in the papers all
topped, of course, by his star turn in court. I'm not saying that he
deliberately falsified his story, or perjured himself. I think it's possible that
lie could have passed a lie detector test with flying colours, or sworn on his
mother's sacred name that I bought those dishtowels. But still memory is
such a goddam subjective thing.
'I know this much: even though my own lawyer thought I had to be lying
about half my story, he never bought that business about the dishtowels. It's
crazy on the face of it. I was pig-drunk, too drunk to have been thinking
about muffling the gunshots. If I'd done it, I just would have let them rip.'
He went up to the turnout and parked there. He drank beer and smoked
cigarettes. He watched the lights downstairs in Quentin's place go out. He
watched a single light go on upstairs and fifteen minutes later he watched
that one go out. He said he could guess the rest.
'Mr Dufresne, did you then go up to Glenn Quentin's house and kill the
two of them?' his lawyer thundered.
'No, I did not,' Andy answered. By midnight, he said, he was sobering up.
He was also feeling the first signs of a bad hangover. He decided to go
home and sleep it off and think about the whole thing in a more adult
fashion the next day. 'At that time,
as I drove home, I was beginning to think that the wisest course would be
to simply let her go to Reno and get her divorce.'
'Thank you, Mr Dufresne.'
The DA popped up.
'You divorced her in the quickest way you could think of, didn't you? You
divorced her with a.38 revolver wrapped in dishtowels, didn't you?'
'No sir, I did not,' Andy said calmly.
'And then you shot her lover.'
'No, sir.'
'You mean you shot Quentin first?'
'I mean I didn't shoot either one of them. I drank two quarts of beer and
smoked however many cigarettes that the police found at the turnout. Then
I drove home and went to bed.'
'You told the jury that between 24 August and 10 September, you were
feeling suicidal.'
'Yes, sir.'
'Suicidal enough to buy a revolver.'
'Yes.'
'Would it bother you overmuch, Mr Dufresne, if I told you that you do
not seem to me to be the suicidal type?'
'No,' Andy said, 'but you don't impress me as being terribly sensitive, and
I doubt very much that, if I were feeling suicidal, I would take my problem
to you.'
There was a slight tense titter in the courtroom at this, but it won him no
points with the jury.
'Did you take your.38 with you on the night of September?'
'No; as I've already testified -'
'Oh, yes!' The DA smiled sarcastically. 'You threw it into the river, didn't
you? The Royal River. On the afternoon of 9 September.'
'Yes, sir.'
'One day before the murders.'
'Yes, sir.'
'That's convenient, isn't it?'
'It's neither convenient nor inconvenient. Only the truth.'
'I believe you heard Lieutenant Mincher's testimony?' Mincher had been
in charge of the party which had dragged the stretch of the Royal near Pond
Bridge, from which Andy had testified he had thrown the gun. The police
had not found it 'Yes, sir. You know I heard it.'
Then you heard him testify that they found no gun, although they
dragged for three days.
That was rather convenient, too, wasn't it?'
'Convenience aside, it's a fact that they didn't find the gun,' Andy
responded calmly. 'But I should like to point out to both you and the jury
that the Pond Road Bridge is very close to where the Royal River empties
into the Bay of Yarmouth. The current is strong. The gun may have been
carried out into the bay itself.'
'And so no comparison can be made between the riflings on the bullets
taken from the bloodstained corpses of your wife and Mr Glenn Quentin
and the riflings on the barrel of your gun. That's correct, isn't it, Mr
Dufresne?'
'Yes.'
That's also rather convenient, isn't it?'
At that, according to the papers, Andy displayed one of the few slight
emotional reactions he allowed himself during the entire six-week period of
the trial. A slight, bitter smile crossed his face.
'Since I am innocent of this crime, sir, and since I am telling the truth
about throwing my gun into the river the day before the crime took place,
then it seems to me decidedly inconvenient that the gun was never found.'
The DA hammered at him for two days. He re-read the Handy-Pik clerk's
testimony about the dishtowels to Andy. Andy repeated that he could not
recall buying them, but admitted that he also couldn't remember not buying
them.
Was it true that Andy and Linda Dufresne had taken out a joint insurance
policy in early 1947? Yes, that was true. And if acquitted, wasn't it true that
Andy stood to gain $50,000 in benefits? True. And wasn't it true that he had
gone up to Glenn Quentin's house with murder in his heart, and wasn't it
also true that he had indeed committed murder twice over? No, it was not
true. Then what did he think had happened, since there had been no signs of
robbery?
'I have no way of knowing that, sir,' Andy said quietly.
The case went to the jury at one p. m. on a snowy Wednesday afternoon.
The twelve jurymen and women came back at three-thirty. The bailiff said
they would have been back earlier, but they had held off in order to enjoy a
nice chicken dinner from Bentley's Restaurant at the county's expense. They
found him guilty, and brother, if Maine had the death penalty, he would
have done the airdance before that spring's crocuses poked their heads out
of the dirt.
The DA had asked him what he thought had happened, and Andy slipped
the question -but he did have an idea, and I got it out of him late one
evening in 1955. It had taken those seven years for us to progress from
nodding acquaintances to fairly close friends -but I never felt really close to
Andy until 1960 or so, and I believe I was the only one who ever did get
really close to him. Both being long-timers, we were in the same cellblock
from beginning to end, although I was halfway down the corridor from him.
'What do I think?' He laughed-but there was no humour in the sound. 'I
think there was a lot of bad luck floating around that night. More than could
ever get together in the same short span of time again. I think it must have
been some stranger, just passing through. Maybe someone who had a flat
tire on that road after I went home. Maybe a burglar. Maybe a psychopath.
He killed them, that's all. And I'm here.'
As simple as that. And he was condemned to spend the rest of his life in
Shawshank-or the part of it that mattered. Five years later he began to have
parole hearings, and he was turned down just as regular as clockwork in
spite of being a model prisoner. Getting a pass out of Shawshank when
you've got murder stamped on your admittance-slip is slow work, as slow
as a river eroding a rock. Seven men sit on the board, two more than at most
state prisons, and every one of those seven has an ass as hard as the water
drawn up from a mineral-spring well You can't buy those guys, you can't
no, you can't cry for them. As far as the board concerned, money don't talk,
and nobody walks. For other reasons in Andy's case as well but that
belongs a little further along in my story. There was a trustee, name of
Kendricks, who was into me for some pretty heavy money back in the
fifties, and it was four years before he got it all paid off. Most of the interest
he paid me was information-in my line of work, you're dead if you can't
find ways of keeping your ear to the ground. This Kendricks, for instance,
had access to records I was never going to see running a stamper down in
the goddam plate-shop. Kendricks told me that the parole board vote was 7-
0 against Andy Dufresne through 1957, 6-1 in '58, 7-0 again in '59, and 5-2
in '60. After that I don't know, but I do know that sixteen years later he was
still in Cell 14 of Cellblock
5. By tben, 1976, he was fifty-eight. They probably would have gotten
big-hearted and let him out around 1983. They give you fife, and that's what
they take-all of it that counts, anyway. Maybe they set you loose someday,
but well, Listen: I knew this guy, Sherwood Bolton, his name was, and he
had this pigeon in his cell. From 1945 until 1953, when they let him out, he
had that pigeon. He wasn't any Birdman of Alcatraz; he just had this pigeon.
Jake, he called him. He set Jake free a day before he, Sherwood, that is, was
to walk, and Jake flew away just as pretty as you could want. But about a
week after Sherwood Bolton left our happy little family, a friend of mine
called me over to the west corner of the exercise yard, where Sherwood
used to hang out, and my friend said: 'Isn't that Jake, Red?' It was. That
pigeon was just as dead as a turd.
I remember the first time Andy Dufresne got in touch with me for
something; I remember like it was yesterday. That wasn't the time he
wanted Rita Hayworth, though. That came later. In that summer of 1948 he
came around for something else. Most of my deals are done right there in
the exercise yard, and that's where this one went down. Our yard is big,
much bigger than most. It's a perfect square, ninety yards on a side. The
north side is the outer wall, with a guardtower at either end. The guards up
there are armed with binoculars and riot guns. The main gate is in that north
side. The truck loading-bays are on the south side of the yard. There are
five of them. Shawshank is a busy place during the work-week-deliveries
in, deliveries out. We have the license-plate factory, and a big industrial
laundry that does all the prison wetwash, plus that of Kittery Receiving
Hospital and the Eliot Sanatorium. There's also a big automotive garage
where mechanic inmates fix prison, state, and municipal vehicles-not to
mention the private cars of the screws, the administration officers and, on
more than one occasion, those of the parole board.
The east side is a thick stone wall full of tiny slit windows. Cellblock 5 is
on the other side of that wail. The west side is Administration and the
infirmary. Shawshank has never been as overcrowded as most prisons, and
back in '48 it was only filled to something like two-thirds capacity, but at
any given time there might be eighty to a hundred and twenty cons on the
yard-playing toss with a football or a baseball, shooting craps, jawing at
each other, making deals. On Sunday the place was even more crowded; on
Sunday the place would have looked like a country holiday if there had
been any women.
It was on a Sunday that Andy first came to me. I had just finished talking
to Elmore Armitage, a fellow who often came in handy to me, about a radio
when Andy walked up.
I knew who he was, of course; he had a reputation for being a snob and a
cold
fish.
People were saying he was marked for trouble already. One of the people
saying so was Bogs Dismond, a bad man to have on your case. Andy had no
cellmate, and I'd heard that was just the way he wanted it, although the one-
man cells in Cellblock 5 were only a little bigger than coffins. But I don't
have to listen to rumours about a man when I can judge him for myself.
'Hello,' he said. 'I'm Andy Dufresne.' He offered his hand and I shook it.
He wasn't a man to waste time being social; he got right to the point. 'I
understand that you're a man who knows how to get things.'
I agreed that I was able to locate certain items from time to time, 'How do
you do that?' Andy asked.
'Sometimes,' I said, 'things just seem to come into my hand. I can't
explain it. Unless it's because I'm Irish.'
He smiled a little at that. 'I wonder if you could get me a rock hammer.'
'What would that be, and why would you want it?'
Andy looked surprised. 'Do you make motivations a part of your
business?' With words like those I could understand how he had gotten a
reputation for being the snobby sort, the kind of guy who likes to put on
airs-but I sensed a tiny thread of humour in his question.
I'll tell you,' I said. 'If you wanted a toothbrush, I wouldn't ask questions.
I'd just quote you a price. Because a toothbrush, you see, is a non-lethal sort
of a weapon.'
"You have strong feelings about lethal weapons?'
'I do.'
An old friction-taped baseball flew towards us and he turned, cat-quick,
and picked it out of the air. It was a move Frank Malzone would have been
proud of. Andy flicked the bail back to where it had come from -just a
quick and easy-looking flick of the wrist, but that throw had some mustard
on it, just the same. I could see a lot of people were watching us with one
eye as they went about their business. Probably the guards in tile tower
were watching, too. I won't gild the lily; there are cons that swing weight in
any prison, maybe four or five in a small one, maybe two or three dozen in
a big one. At Shawshank I was one of those with some weight, and what I
thought of Andy Dufresne would have a lot to do with how his time went.
He probably knew it too, but he wasn't kowtowing or sucking up to me, and
I respected him for that.
'Fair enough. Ill tell you what it is and why I want it A rock-hammer
looks like a miniature pickaxe-about so long.' He held his hands about a
foot apart, and that was when I first noticed how neatly kept his nails were.
'It's got a small sharp pick on one end and a fiat, blunt hammerhead on the
other. I want it because I like rocks.'
'Rocks,' I said.
'Squat down here a minute,' he said.
I humoured him. We hunkered down on our haunches like Indians. Andy
took a handful of exercise yard dirt and began to sift it between his neat
hands, so it emerged in a fine cloud. Small pebbles were left over, one or
two sparkly, the rest dull and plain. One of the dull ones was quartz, but it
was only dull until you'd rubbed it clean. Then it had a nice milky glow.
Andy did the cleaning and then tossed it to me. I caught it and named it.
'Quartz, sure,' he said, 'And look. Mica. Shale, silted granite. Here's a
piece of graded limestone, from when they cut this place out of the side of
the hill.' He tossed them away and dusted his hands. 'I'm a rockhound. At
least I was a rockhound. In my old life. I'd like to be one again, on a
limited scale.'
'Sunday expeditions in the exercise yard?' I asked, standing up. It was a
silly idea, and yet seeing that little piece of quartz had given my heart a
funny tweak. I don't know exactly why; just an association with the outside
world, I suppose. You didn't think of such things in terms of the yard.
Quartz was something you picked out of a small, quick-running stream.
'Better to have Sunday expeditions here than no Sunday expeditions at
all,' he said. 'You could plant an item like that rock-hammer in somebody's
skull,' I remarked. 'I have no enemies here,' he said quietly. 'No?' I smiled.
'Wait awhile.'
'If there's trouble, I can handle it without using a rock-hammer.'
'Maybe you want to try an escape? Going under the wall? Because if you
do -' He laughed politely. When I saw the rock-hammer three weeks later, I
understood why. "You know,' I said, 'if anyone sees you with it, they'll take
it away. If they saw
you with a spoon, they'd take it away. What you going to do, just sit
down here in the yard and tap away?' 'Oh, I believe I can do a lot better than
that.'
I nodded. That part of it really wasn't my business, anyway. A man
engages my services to get him something. Whether he can keep it or not
after I get it is his business. 'How much would an item like that go for?' I
asked. I was beginning to enjoy his quiet, low-key style. When you've spent
ten years in stir, as I had then, you can get awfully tired of the bellowers
and the braggarts and the loud-mouths. Yes, I think it would be fair to say I
liked Andy from the first.
'Eight dollars in any rock-and-gem shop,' he said, 'but I realize that in a
business like yours you work on a cost-plus basis-'
'Cost plus ten per cent is my going rate, but I have to go up some on a
dangerous item. For something like the gadget you're talking about, it takes
a little more goose-grease to get the wheels turning. Let's say ten dollars.'
'Ten it is'
I looked at him, smiling a little. 'Have you got ten dollars?'
'I do,' he said quietly.
A long time after, I discovered that he had better than five hundred. He
had brought it in with him. When they check you in at this hotel, one of the
bellhops is obliged to bend you over and take a look up your works-but
there are a lot of works, and, not to put too fine a point on it, a man who is
really determined can get a fairly large item quite a ways up them-far
enough to be out of sight, unless the bellhop you happen to draw is in the
mood to pull on a rubber glove and go prospecting.
That's fine,' I said. 'You ought to know what I expect if you get caught
with what I get you.'
'I suppose I should,' he said, and I could tell by the slight change in his
grey eyes that he knew exactly what I was going to say. It was a slight
lightening, a gleam of his special ironic humour.
'If you get caught, you'll say you found it. That's about the long and short
of it. They'll put you in solitary for three or four weeks plus, of course,
you'll lose your toy and you'll get a black mark on your record. If you give
them my name, you and I will never do business again. Not for so much as
a pair of shoelaces or a bag of Bugler. And I'll send some fellows around to
lump you up. I don't like violence, but you'll understand my position. I can't
allow it to get around that I can't handle myself. That would surely finish
me.'
'Yes. I suppose it would, I understand, and you don't need to worry.'
'I never worry,' I said. 'In a place like this there's no percentage in it.'
He nodded and walked away. Three days later he walked up beside me in
the exercise yard during the laundry's morning break. He didn't speak or
even look my way, but pressed a picture of the Hon. Alexander Hamilton
into my hand as neatly as a good magician does a card-trick. He was a man
who adapted fast. I got him his rock-hammer. I had it in my cell for one
night, and it was just as he described it It was no tool for escape (it would
have taken a man just about six hundred years to tunnel under the wall
using that rock-hammer, I figured), but I still felt some misgivings. If you
planted that pickaxe end in a man's head, he would surely never listen to
Fibber McGee and Molly on the radio again. And Andy had already begun
having trouble with the sisters. I hoped it wasn't them he was wanting the
rock-hammer for.
In the end, I trusted my judgment. Early the next morning, twenty
minutes before the wake-up horn went off, I slipped the rock-hammer and a
package of Camels to Ernie, the old trusty who swept the Cellblock 5
corridors until he was let
free in 1956. He slipped it into his tunic without a word, and I didn't see
the rock-hammer again for seven years.
The following Sunday Andy walked over to me in the exercise yard
again. He was nothing to look at that day, I can tell you. His lower lip was
swelled up so big it looked like a summer sausage, his right eye was
swollen half-shut, and there was an ugly washboard scrape across one
cheek. He was having his troubles with the sisters, all right, but he never
mentioned them. 'Thanks for the tool,' he said, and walked away.
I watched him curiously. He walked a few steps, saw in the dirt, bent
over, and picked it up. It was a small rock. Prison fatigues, except for those
worn by mechanics when they're on the job, have no pockets. But there are
ways to get around that. The little pebble disappeared up Andy's sleeve and
didn't come down. I admired that and I admired him.
In spite of the problems he was having, he was going on with his life.
There are thousands who don't or won't or can't, and plenty of them aren't in
prison, either. And I noticed that, although his face still looked as if a
twister had happened to it, his hands were still neat and clean, the nails
well-kept.
I didn't see much of him over the next six months; Andy spent a lot of
that time in solitary.
A few words about the sisters.
In a lot of pens they are known as bull queers or jailhouse susies-just
lately the term in fashion is 'killer queens'. But in Shawshank they were
always the sisters. I don't know why, but other than the name I guess there
was no difference.
It comes as no surprise to most these days that there's a lot of buggery
going on inside the walls-except to some of the new fish, maybe, who have
the misfortune to be young, slim, good-looking, and unwary-but
homosexuality, like straight sex, comes in a hundred different shapes and
forms. There are men who can't stand to be without sex of some kind and
turn to another man to keep from going crazy. Usually what follows is an
arrangement between two fundamentally "Heterosexual men, although I've
sometimes wondered if they are quite as heterosexual as they thought they
were going to be when they get back to their wives or their girlfriends.
There are also men who get 'turned' in prison. In the current parlance they
'go gay', or 'come out of the closet'. Mostly (but not always) they play the
female, and their favours are competed for fiercely.
And then there are the sisters.
They are to prison society what the rapist is to the society outside the
walls. They're usually long-timers, doing hard bullets for brutal crimes.
Their prey is the young, the weak, and the inexperienced or, as in the case
of Andy Dufresne, the weak-looking.
Their hunting grounds are the showers, the cramped, tunnel-like area way
behind the industrial washers in the laundry, sometimes the infirmary. On
more than one occasion rape has occurred in the closet-sized projection
booth behind the auditorium. Most often what the sisters take by force they
could have had for free, if they wanted it; those who have been turned
always seem to have 'crushes' on one sister or another, like teenage girls
with their Sinatras, Presleys, or Redfords. But for the sisters, the joy has
always been in taking it by force and I guess it always will be.
Because of his small size and fair good looks (and maybe also because of
that very quality of self-possession I had admired), the sisters were after
Andy from the day he walked in. If this was some kind of fairy story, I'd tell
you that Andy fought the good fight until they left him alone. I wish I could
say that, but I can't. Prison is no fairy-tale world.
The first time for him was in the shower less than three days after he
joined our happy Shawshank family. Just a lot of slap and tickle that time, I
understand. They like to size you up before they make their real move, like
jackals finding out if the prey is as weak and hamstrung as it looks.
Andy punched back and bloodied the lip of a big, hulking sister named
Bogs Diamond-gone these many years since to who knows where. A guard
broke it up before it could go any further, but Bogs promised to get him-and
Bogs did.
The second time was behind the washers in the laundry. A lot has gone
on in that long, dusty, and narrow space over the years; the guards know
about it and just let it be. It's dim and littered with bags of washing and
bleaching compound, drums of Hexlite catalyst, as harmless as salt if your
hands are dry, murderous as battery acid if they're wet. The guards don't like
to go back there. There's no room to manoeuvre, and one of the first things
they teach them when they come to work in a place like this is to never let
the cons get you in a place where you can't back up.
Bogs wasn't there that day, but Henry Backus, who had been washroom
foreman down there since 1922, told me that four of his friends were. Andy
held them at bay for a while with a scoop of Hexlite, threatening to throw it
in their eyes if they came any closer, but he tripped trying to back around
one of the big Washex four-pockets. That was all it took.
They were on him.
I guess the phrase gang-rape is one that doesn't change much from one
generation to the next. That's what they did to him, those four sisters. They
bent him over a gearbox and one of them held a Phillips screwdriver to his
temple while they gave him the business. It rips you up some, but not bad-
am I speaking from personal experience, you ask?-I only wish I weren't.
You bleed for a while. If you don't want some clown asking you if you just
started your period, you wad up a bunch of toilet paper and keep it down
the back of your underwear until it stops. The bleeding really is like a
menstrual flow; it keeps up for two, maybe three days, a slow trickle. Then
it stops. No harm done, unless they've done something even more unnatural
to you. No physical harm done-but rape is rape, and eventually you have to
look at your face in the mirror again and decide what to make of yourself.
Andy went through that alone, the way he went through everything alone
in those days.
He must have come to the conclusion that others before him had come to,
namely, that there are only two ways to deal with the sisters: fight them and
get taken, or just get taken.
He decided to fight. When Bogs and two of his buddies came after him a
week or so after the laundry incident ('I heard ya got broke in,' Bogs said,
according to Ernie, who was around at the time), Andy slugged it out with
them. He broke the nose of a fellow named Rooster MacBride, a heavy-
gutted farmer who was in for beating his step-daughter to death. Rooster
died in here, I'm happy to add.
They took him, all three of them. When it was done, Rooster and the
other egg-it might have been Pete Verness, but I'm not completely sure-
forced Andy down to his knees.
Bogs Diamond stepped in front of him. He had a pearl-handled razor in
those days with the words Diamond Pearl engraved on both sides of the
grip. He opened it and said, I'm gonna open my fly now, mister man, and
you're going to swallow what I give you to swallow. And when you done
swallowed mine, you're gonna swallow Rooster's. I guess you done broke
his nose and I think he ought to have something to pay for it'
Andy said, 'Anything of yours that you stick in my mouth, you're going
to lose
it.'
Bogs looked at Andy like he was crazy, Ernie said.
'No,' he told Andy, talking to him slowly, like Andy was a stupid kid.
'You didn't understand what I said. You do anything like that and I'll put all
eight inches of this steel into your ear. Get it?'
'I understand what you said. I don't think you understand me. I'm going to
bite whatever you stick into my mouth. You can put that razor in my brain, I
guess, but you should know that a sudden serious brain injury causes the
victim to simultaneously urinate, defecate and bite down.'
He looked up at Bogs, smiling that little smile of his, old Ernie said, as if
the three of them had been discussing stocks and bonds with him instead of
throwing it to him just as hard as they could. Just as if he was wearing one
of his three-piece bankers' suits instead of kneeling on a dirty broom-closet
floor with his pants around his ankles and blood trickling down the insides
of his thighs.
'In fact,' he went on, 'I understand that the bite-reflex is sometimes so
strong that the victim's jaws have to be pried open with a crowbar or a
jackhandle.'
Bogs didn't put anything in Andy's mouth that night in late February of
1948, and neither did Rooster MacBride, and so far as I know, no one else
ever did, either. What the three of them did was to beat Andy within an inch
of his life, and all four of them ended up doing a jolt in solitary. Andy and
Rooster MacBride went by way of the infirmary.
How many times did that particular crew have at him? I don't know. I
think Rooster lost his taste fairly early on -being in nose-splints for a month
can do that to a fellow -and Bogs Diamond left off that summer, all at once.
That was a strange thing. Bogs was found in his cell, badly beaten, one
morning in early June, when he didn't show up in the breakfast nose-count
He wouldn't say who had done it, or how they had gotten to him, but being
in my business, I know that a screw can be bribed to do almost anything
except get a gun for an inmate. They didn't make big salaries then, and they
don't now. And in those days there was no electronic locking system, no
closed-circuit TV, no master-switches which controlled whole areas of the
prison. Back in 1948, each cellblock had its own turnkey. A guard could
have been bribed real easy to let someone-maybe two or three someones-
into the block, and, yes, even into Diamond's cell.
Of course a job like that would have cost a lot of money. Not by outside
standards, no.
Prison economics are on a smaller scale. When you've been in here a
while, a dollar bill in your hand looks like a twenty did outside. My guess
is, that if Bogs was done, it cost someone a serious piece of change-fifteen
bucks, well say, for the turnkey, and two or store apiece for each of the
lump-up guys.
I'm not saying it was Andy Dufresne, but I do know that he brought in
five hundred dollars when he came, and he was a banker in the straight
world- a man who understands better than the rest of us the ways in which
money can become power.
And I know this: After the beating-the three broken ribs, the
haemorrhaged eye, the sprained back and the dislocated hip-Bogs Diamond
left Andy alone. In fact, after that he left everyone pretty much alone. He
got to be like a high wind in the summertime, all bluster and no bite. You
could say, in fact, that he turned into a 'weak sister'.
That was the end of Bogs Diamond, a man who might eventually have
killed Andy if Andy hadn't taken steps to prevent it (if it was him who took
the steps). But it
wasn't the end of Andy's trouble with the sisters. There was a little hiatus,
and then it began again, although not so hard nor so often. Jackals like easy
prey, and there were easier pickings around than Andy Dufresne.
He always fought them, that's what I remember. He knew, I guess, that if
you let them have at you even once, without fighting it, it got that much
easier to let them have their way without fighting next time. So Andy would
turn up with bruises on his face every once in a while, and there was the
matter of the two broken fingers six or eight months after Diamond's
beating. Oh yes-and sometime in late 1949, the man landed in the infirmary
with a broken cheekbone that was probably the result of someone swinging
a nice chunk of pipe with the business-end wrapped in flannel. He always
fought back, and as a result, he did his time in solitary. But don't think
solitary was the hardship for Andy that it was for some men. He got along
with himself.
The sisters was something he adjusted himself to-and then, in 1950, it
stopped almost completely. That is a part of my story that I'll get to in due
time.
In the fall of 1948, Andy met me one morning in the exercise yard and
asked me if I could get him half a dozen rock-blankets.
'What the hell are those?' I asked.
He told me that was just what rockhounds called them; they were
polishing cloths about the size of dishtowels. They were heavily padded,
with a smooth side and a rough side-the smooth side like fine-grained
sandpaper, the rough side almost as abrasive as industrial steel wool (Andy
also kept a box of that in his cell, although he didn't get it from me-I
imagine he kited it from the prison laundry).
I told him I thought we could do business on those, and I ended up
getting them from the very same rock-and-gem shop where I'd arranged to
get the rock-hammer. This time I charged Andy my usual ten per cent and
not a penny more. I didn't see anything lethal or even dangerous in a dozen
7" x 7" squares of padded cloth. Rock-blankets, indeed.
It was about five months later that Andy asked if I could get him Rita
Hayworth. That conversation took place in the auditorium, during a movie-
show. Nowadays we get the movie-shows once or twice a week, but back
then the shows were a monthly event. Usually the movies we got had a
morally uplifting message to them, and this one, The Lost Weekend, was no
different. The moral was that it's dangerous to drink. It was a moral we
could take some comfort in.
Andy manoeuvred to get next to me, and about halfway through the show
he leaned a little closer and asked if I could get him Rita Hayworth. I'll tell
you the truth, it kind of tickled me. He was usually cool, calm, and
collected, but that night he was jumpy as hell, almost embarrassed, as if he
was asking me to get him a load of Trojans or one of those sheepskin-lined
gadgets that are supposed to 'enhance your solitary pleasure,' as the
magazines put it. He seemed overcharged, a man on the verge of blowing
his radiator.
'I can get her,' I said. 'No sweat, calm down. You want the big one or the
little one?' At that time Rita was my best girl (a few years before it had been
Betty Grable) and she came in two sizes. For a buck you could get the little
Rita. For two-fifty you could have the big Rita, four feet high and all
woman.
'The big one,' he said, not looking at me. I tell you, he was a hot sketch
that night He was blushing just like a kid trying to get into a kootch show
with his big brother's draft-card.
'Can you do it?'
'Take it easy, sure I can. Does a bear shit in the woods?' The audience
was applauding and catcalling as the bugs came out of the walls to get Ray
Milland, who was having a bad case of the DT's.
'How soon?'
'A week. Maybe less.'
'Okay.' But he sounded disappointed, as if he had been hoping I had one
stuffed down my pants right then. 'How much?"
I quoted him the wholesale price. I could afford to give him this one at
cost; he'd been a good customer, what with his rock-hammer and his rock-
blankets. Furthermore, he'd been a good boy-on more than one night when
he was having his problems with Bogs, Rooster, and the rest, I wondered
how long it would be before he used the rock-hammer to crack someone's
head open.
Posters are a big part of my business, just behind the booze and
cigarettes, usually half a step ahead of the reefer. In the 60s the business
exploded in every direction, with a lot of people wanting funky hang-ups
like Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, that Easy Rider poster. But mostly it's girls;
one pinup queen after another.
A few days after I spoke to Ernie, a laundry driver I did business with
back then brought in better than sixty posters, most of them Rita
Hayworths. You may even remember the picture; I sure do. Rita is dressed-
sort of- in a bathing suit, one hand behind her head, her eyes half closed,
those full, sulky red lips parted. They called it Rita Hayworth, but they
might as well have called it Woman in Heat.
The prison administration knows about the black market, in case you
were wondering. Sure they do. They probably know as much about my
business as I do myself. They live with it because they know that a prison is
like a big pressure cooker, and there have to be vents somewhere to let off
steam. They make the occasional bust, and I've done time in solitary a time
or three over the years, but when it's something like posters, they wink.
Live and let live. And when a big Rita Hayworth went up in some fishie's
cell, the assumption was that it came in the mail from a friend or a relative.
Of course all the care-packages from friends and relatives are opened and
the contents inventoried, but who goes back and re-checks the inventory
sheets for something as harmless as a Rita Hayworth or an Ava Gardner
pin-up? When you're in a pressure-cooker you learn to live and let live or
somebody will carve you a brand-new mouth just above the Adam's apple.
You learn to make allowances.
It was Ernie again who took the poster up to Andy's cell, 14, my own, 6.
And it was Ernie who brought back the written in Andy's careful hand, just
one word: Thanks.' A little while later, as they filed us out for morning
chow, I glanced into his ceil and saw Rita over his bunk in all her
swimsuited glory, one hand behind her head, her eyes half-closed, those
soft, satiny lips parted. It was over his bunk when he could look at her
nights, after lights out, in the glow of the arc sodiums in the exercise yard.
But in the bright morning sunlight, there were dark slashes across her face-
the shadow of the bars on his single slit-window.
Now I'm going to tell you what happened in mid-May of 1950 that
finally ended Andy's three-year series of skirmishes with the sisters. It was
also the incident which eventually got him out of the laundry and into the
library, where he filled out his work-time until he left our happy little
family earlier this year.
You may have noticed now much of what I've told you already is
hearsay-someone saw something and told me and I told you. Well, in some
cases I've simplified it even more than it really was, and have actually
repeated (or will repeat) fourth- or fifth-hand information. That's the way it
is here. The grapevine is very real, and you have to use it if you're going to
stay ahead. Also, of course, you have to know
how to pick out the grains of truth from the chaff of lies, rumours, and
wish-it-had-beens. You may also have gotten the idea that I'm describing
someone who's more legend than man, and I would have to agree that
there's some truth to that. To us long-timers who knew Andy over a space of
years, there was an element of fantasy to him, a sense, almost, of myth-
magic, if you get what I mean. That story I passed on about Andy refusing
to give Bogs Diamond a head-job is part of that myth, and how he kept on
fighting the sisters is part of it, and how he got the library job is part of it,
too but with one important difference: I was there and I saw what
happened, and I swear on my mother's name that it's all true. The oath of a
convicted murderer may not be worth much, but believe this: I don't lie.
Andy and I were on fair speaking terms by then. The guy fascinated me.
Looking back to the poster episode, I see there's one thing I neglected to tell
you, and maybe I should.
Five weeks after he hung Rita up (I'd forgotten all about it by then, and
had gone on to other deals), Ernie passed a small white box through the bars
of my cell.
'From Dufresne,' he said, low, and never missed a stroke with his push-
broom.
Thanks, Ernie,' I said, and slipped him half a pack of Camels.
Now what the hell was this, I was wondering as I slipped the cover from
the box. There was a lot of white cotton inside, and below that
I looked for a long time. For a few minutes it was like I didn't even dare
touch them, they were so pretty. There's a crying shortage of pretty things in
the slam, and the real pity of it is that a lot of men don't even seem to miss
them.
There were two pieces of quartz in that box, both of them carefully
polished. They had been chipped into driftwood shapes. There were little
sparkles of iron pyrites in them like flecks of gold. If they hadn't been so
heavy, they would have served as a fine pair of men's cufflinks-they were
that close to being a matched set How much work went into creating those
two pieces? Hours and hours after lights out, I knew that first the chipping
and shaping, and then the almost endless polishing and finishing with those
rock-blankets. Looking at them, I felt the warmth that any man or woman
feels when he or she is looking at something pretty, something that has been
worked and made-that's the thing that really separates us from the animals, I
think-and I felt something else, too. A sense of awe for the man's brute
persistence. But I never knew just how persistent Andy Dufresne could be
until much later.
In May of 1950, the powers that be decided that the roof of the licence-
plate factory ought to be resurfaced with roofing tar. They wanted it done
before it got too hot up there, and they sued for volunteers for the work,
which was planned to take about a week.
More than seventy men spoke up, because it was outside work and May
is one damn fine month for outside work. Nine or ten names were drawn
out of a hat, and two of them happened to be Andy's and my own.
For the next week we'd be marched out to the exercise yard after
breakfast, with two guards up front and two more behind plus all the
guards in the towers keeping a weather eye on the proceedings through their
field-glasses for good measure.
Four of us would be carrying a big extension ladder on those morning
marches -I always got a kick out of the way Dickie Betts, who was on that
job, called that sort of ladder an extensible-and we'd put it up against the
side of that low, lit building. Then we'd start bucket-brigading hot buckets
of tar up to the roof. Spill that shit on you and you'd jitterbug all the way to
the infirmary.
There were six guards on the project, all of them picked on the basis of
seniority. It was almost as good as a week's vacation, because instead of
sweating it out in the laundry or the plate-shop or standing over a bunch of
cons cutting pulp or brush somewhere out in the willy wags, they were
having a regular May holiday in the sun, just sitting there with their backs
up against the low parapet, shooting the bull back and forth.
They didn't even have to keep more than half an eye on us, because the
south wall sentry post was close enough so that the fellows up there could
have spit their chews on us, if they'd wanted to. If anyone on the roof-
sealing party had made one funny move, it would take four seconds to cut
him smack in two with.45 calibre machine-gun bullets. So those screws just
sat there and took their ease. All they needed was a couple of six-packs
buried in crushed ice, and they would have been the lords of all creation.
One of them was a fellow named Byron Hadley, and in that year of 1950,
he'd been at Shawshank longer than I had. Longer than the last two wardens
put together, as a matter of fact. The fellow running the show in 1950 was a
prissy-looking downcast Yankee named George Dunahy. He had a degree in
penal administration. No one liked him, as far as I could tell, except the
people who had gotten him his appointment. I heard that he wasn't
interested in anything but compiling statistics for a book (which was later
published by a small New England outfit called Light Side Press, where he
probably had to pay to have it done), who won the intramural baseball
championship each September, and getting a death-penalty law passed in
Maine. A regular bear for the death-penalty was George Dunahy. He was
fired off the job in 1953, when it came out he was running a discount auto
repair service down in the prison garage and splitting the profits with Byron
Hadley and Greg Stammas. Hadley and Stammas came out of that one
okay-they were old hands at keeping their asses covered-but Dunahy took a
walk. No one was sorry to see him go, but nobody was exactly pleased to
see Greg Stammas step into his shoes, either. He was a short man with a
tight, hard gut and the coldest brown eyes you ever saw. He always had a
painful, pursed little grin on his face, as if he had to go to the bathroom and
couldn't quite manage it. During Stammas's tenure as warden there was a lot
of brutality at Shawshank, and although I have no proof, I believe there
were maybe half a dozen moonlight burials in the stand of scrub forest that
lies east of the prison. Dunahy was bad, but Greg Stammas was a cruel,
wretched, cold-hearted man. He and Byron Hadley were good friends. As
warden, George Dunahy was nothing but a posturing figurehead; it was
Stammas, and through him, Hadley, who actually administered the prison.
Hadley was a tall, shambling man with thinning red hair. He sunburned
easily and he talked loud and if you didn't move fast enough to suit him,
he'd clout you with his stick. On that day, our third on the roof, he was
talking to another guard named Mert Entwhistle.
Hadley had gotten some amazingly good news, so he was griping about it.
That was his style-he was a thankless man with not a good word for anyone,
a man who was convinced that the whole world was against him. The world
had cheated him out of the best years of his life, and the world would be
more than happy to cheat him out of the rest. I have seen some screws that I
thought were almost saintly, and I think I know why that happens-they are
able to see the difference between their own lives, poor and struggling as
they might be, and the lives of the men they are paid by the state to watch
over. These guards are able to formulate a comparison concerning pain.
Others can't, or won't.
For Byron Hadley there was no basis of comparison. He could sit there,
cool and at his ease under the warm May sun and find the gall to mourn his
own good luck while less than ten feet away a bunch of men were working
and sweating and burning their hands on great big buckets filled with
bubbling tar, men who had to work so hard in their ordinary round of days
that this looked like a respite. You may remember the old question, the one
that's supposed to define your outlook on life when you answer it. For
Byron Hadley the answer would always be half empty, the glass is half
empty. Forever and ever, amen. If you gave him a cool drink of apple cider,
he'd think about vinegar. If you told him his wife had always been faithful
to him, he'd tell you it was because she was so damn ugly. So there he sat,
talking to Mert Entwhistle loud enough for all of us to hear, his broad white
forehead already starting to redden with the sun. He had one hand thrown
back over the low parapet surrounding the roof. The other was on the butt
of his.38. We all got the story along with Mert. It seemed that Hadley's
older brother had gone off to Texas some fourteen years ago and the rest of
the family hadn't heard from the son of a bitch since. They had all assumed
he was dead, and good riddance. Then, a week and a half ago, a lawyer had
called them longdistance from Austin. It seemed that Hadley's brother had
died four months ago, and a rich man at that ('It's frigging incredible how
lucky some assholes can get,' this paragon of gratitude on the plate-shop
roof said). The money had come as a result of oil and oil-leases, and there
was close to a million dollars. No, Hadley wasn't a millionaire-that might
have made even him happy, at least for a while-but the brother had left a
pretty damned decent bequest of thirty-five thousand dollars to each
surviving member of his family back in Maine, if they could be found. Not
bad. Like getting lucky and winning a sweepstakes.
But to Byron Hadley the glass was always half-empty. He spent most of
the morning bitching to Mert about the bite that the goddam government
was going to take out of his windfall. "They'll leave me about enough to
buy a new car with,' he allowed, 'and then what happens? You have to pay
the damn taxes on the car, and the repairs and maintenance, you get your
goddam kids pestering you to take 'em for a ride with the top down -'
'And to drive it, if they're old enough,' Mert said. Old Mert Entwhistle
knew which side his bread was buttered on, and he didn't say what must
have been as obvious to him as to the rest of us: If that money's worrying
you so bad, Byron old kid old sock, I'll just take it off your hands. After all,
what are friends for?
That's right, wanting to drive it, wanting to learn to drive on it, for
Chrissake, ' Byron said with a shudder. 'Then what happens at the end of the
year? If you figured the tax wrong and you don't have enough left over to
pay the overdraft, you got to pay out of your own pocket, or maybe even
borrow it from one of those kikey loan agencies. And they audit you
anyway, you know. It don't matter. And when the government audits you,
they always take more. Who can fight Uncle Sam? He puts his hand inside
your shirt and squeezes your tit until it's purple, and you end up getting the
short end. Christ.' He lapsed into a morose silence, thinking of what terrible
bad luck he'd had to inherit that $35,000. Andy Dufresne had been
spreading tar with a big Padd brush less than fifteen feet away and now he
tossed it into his pail and walked over to where Mert and Hadley were
sitting.
We all tightened up, and I saw one of the other screws, Tim Youngblood,
drag his hand down to where his pistol was bolstered. One of the fellows in
the sentry tower struck his partner on the arm and they both turned, too. For
one moment I thought Andy was going to get shot, or clubbed, or Then he
said, very softly, to Hadley: 'Do you trust your wife?' Hadley just stared at
him. He was starting to get red in the face, and I knew that was a bad sign.
In about three seconds he as going to pull his billy and give Andy the butt
end of it right in the solar plexus, where that big bundle of nerves is. A hard
enough hit there can kill you, but they always go for it. If itdoesn't kill you
it will paralyze you long enough to forget whatever cute move it was that
you had planned.
"Boy," Hadley said, 'I'll give you just one chance to pick up that Padd.
And then you're goin' off this roof on your head.'
Andy just looked at him, very calm and still. His eyes were like ice. It
was as if he hadn't heard. And I found myself wanting to tell him how it
was, to give him the crash course.
The crash course is you never let on that you hear the guards talking, you
never try to horn in on their conversation unless you're asked (and then you
always tell them just what they wanting to hear and shut up again). Black
man, white man, red man., yellow man, in prison it doesn't matter because
we've got our own brand of equality. In prison every con's a nigger and you
have to get used to the idea if you intend to survive men like Hadley and
Greg Staminas, who really would kill you. just as soon as look at you.
When you're in stir you belong to the state and if you forget it, woe is you.
I've known men who've lost eyes, men who've lost toes and fingers; I knew
one man who lost the tip of his penis and counted himself lucky that was all
he lost. I wanted to tell Andy that it was already too late. He could go back
and pick up his brush and there would still be some big lug waiting for him
in the showers that night, ready to charlie-horse both of his legs and leave
him writhing on the cement. You could buy a lug like rat for a pack of
cigarettes or three Baby Ruths. Most of all, I wanted to tell him not to make
it any worse than it already was.
What I did was to keep on running tar onto the roof as if nothing at all
was happening.
Like everyone else, I look after my own ass first. I have to. It's cracked
already, and in Shawshank there have always been Hadleys wiling to finish
the job of breaking it.
Andy said, 'Maybe I put it wrong. Whether you trust her or not is
immaterial. The problem is whether or not you believe she would ever go
behind your back, try to hamstring you.'
Hadley got up. Mert got up. Tim Youngblood got up. Hadley's face was
as red as the side of a firebarn. 'Your only, problem,' he said, 'is going to be
how many bones you still get unbroken. You can count them in the
infirmary. Come on, Mert We're throwing this sucker over the side.'
Tim Youngblood drew his gun. The rest of us kept tarring like mad. The
sun beat down.
They were going to do it; Hadley and Mert were simply going to pitch
him over the side.
Terrible accident Dufresne, prisoner 81433-SHNK, was taking a couple
of empties down and slipped on the ladder. Too bad.
They laid hold of him, Mert on the right arm, Hadley on the left. Andy
didn't resist. His eyes never left Hadley's red, horsey face.
'If you've got your thumb on her, Mr Hadley,' he said in that same calm,
composed voice, 'there's not a reason why you shouldn't have every cent of
that money. Final score, Mr Byron Hadley thirty-five thousand, Uncle Sam
zip.'
Mert started to drag him towards the edge. Hadley just stood still. For a
moment Andy was like a rope between them in a tug-of-war game. Then
Hadley said, 'Hold on one second, Mert. What do you mean, boy?'
'I mean, if you've got your thumb on your wife, you can give it to her,'
Andy
said.
'You better start making sense, boy, or you're going over.'
"The government allows you a one-time-only gift to your spouse,' Andy
said. 'It's good up to sixty thousand dollars.'
Hadley was now looking at Andy as if he had been poleaxed. 'Naw, that
ain't right,' he said. 'Tax free?'
'Tax free,' Andy said. 'IRS can't touch cent one.'
'How would you know a thing like that?'
Tim Youngblood said: 'He used to be a banker, Byron. I s'pose he might-'
'Shut ya head, Trout,' Hadley said without looking at him. Tim
Youngblood flushed and shut up. Some of the guards called him Trout
because of his thick lips and buggy eyes. Hadley kept looking at Andy.
'You're the smart banker who shot his wife. Why should I believe a smart
banker like you? So I can wind up in here breaking rocks right alongside
you? You'd like that, wouldn't you?'
Andy said quietly, 'If you went to jail for tax evasion, you'd go to a
federal penitentiary, not Shawshank. But you won't. The tax-free gift to the
spouse is a perfectly legal loophole. I've done dozens no, hundreds of
them. It's meant primarily for people with small businesses to pass on, or
for people who come into one-time-only windfalls. Like yourself.'
'I think you're lying,' Hadley said, but he didn't-you could see he didn't.
There was an emotion dawning on his face, something that was grotesque
overlying that long, ugly countenence and that receding, sunburned brow.
An almost obscene emotion when seen on the features of Byron Hadley. It
was hope.
'No, I'm not lying. There's no reason why you should take my word for it,
either. Engage a lawyer -'
'Ambulance-chasing highway-robbing cocksuckers!' Hadley cried. Andy
shrugged. "Then go to the IRS. They'll tell you the same thing for free.
Actually, you don't need me to tell you at all. You would have investigated
the matter for yourself.'
'You fucking-A. I don't need any smart wife-killing banker to show me
where the bear shit in the buckwheat.'
'You'll need a tax lawyer or a banker to set up the gift for you and that
will cost you something,' Andy said. 'Or if you were interested, I'd be glad
to set it up for you nearly free of charge. The price would be three beers
apiece for my co-workers -'
'Co-workers,' Mert said, and let out a rusty guffaw. He slapped his knee.
A real knee-slapper was old Mert, and I hope he died of intestinal cancer in
a part of the world were morphine is as of yet undiscovered. 'Co-workers,
ain't that cute? Co-workers! You ain't got any -'
'Shut your friggin' trap,' Hadley growled, and Mert shut. Hadley looked at
Andy again. 'What was you saying?'
'I was saying that I'd only ask three beers apiece for my co-workers, if
that seems fair,' Andy said. 'I think a man feels more like a man when he's
working out of doors in the springtime if he can have a bottle of suds. That's
only my opinion. It would go down smooth, and I'm sure you'd have their
gratitude.'
I have talked to some of the other men who were up there that day-
Rennie Martin, Logan St Pierre, and Paul Bonsaint were three of them-and
we all saw the same thing then felt the same thing. Suddenly it was Andy
who had the upper hand. It was Hadley who had the gun on his hip and the
billy in his hand, Hadley who had his friend Greg Staminas behind him and
the whole prison administration behind Stammas, the whole power of the
state behind that, but all at once in that golden
sunshine it didn't matter, and I felt my heart leap up in my chest as it
never had since the truck drove me and four others through the gate back in
1938 and I stepped out into the exercise yard.
Andy was looking at Hadley with those cold, clear, calm eyes, and it
wasn't just the thirty-five thousand then, we all agreed on that. I've played it
over and over in my mind and I know. It was man against man, and Andy
simply forced him, the way a strong man can force a weaker man's wrist to
the table in a game of Indian wrestling. There was no reason, you see, why
Hadley couldn't've given Mert the nod at that very minute, pitched Andy
overside onto his head, and still taken Andy's advice.
No reason. But he didn't.
'I could get you all a couple of beers if I wanted to,' Hadley said. 'A beer
does taste good while you're workin.' The colossal prick even managed to
sound magnanimous.
'I'd just give you one piece of advice the IRS wouldn't bother with,' Andy
said. His eyes were fixed unwinkingly on Hadley's. 'Make the gift to your
wife if you're sure. If you think there's even a chance she might double-
cross you or backshoot you, we could work out something else -'
'Double-cross me?' Hadley asked harshly. 'Double-cross me! Mr Hotshot
Banker, if she ate her way through a boxcar of Ex-Lax, she wouldn't dare
fart unless I gave her the nod.'
Mert, Youngblood, and the other screws yucked it up dutifully. Andy
never cracked a smile.
'I'll write down the forms you need,' he said. 'You can get them at the post
office, and I'll fill them out for your signature.'
That sounded suitably important, and Hadley's chest swelled. Then he
glared around at the rest of us and hollered, "What are you jimmies starin'
at? Move your asses, goddammit!' He looked back at Andy. 'You come over
here with me, hotshot. And listen to me well: if you're Jewing me somehow,
you're gonna find yourself chasing your head around Shower C before the
week's out.'
'Yes, I understand that,' Andy said softly.
And he did understand it. The way it turned out, he understood a lot more
than I did-more than any of us did.
That's how, on the second-to-last day of the job, the convict crew that
tarred the plate-factory roof in 1950 ending up sitting in a row at ten o'clock
on a spring morning, drinking Black Label beer supplied by the hardest
screw that ever walked a turn at Shawshank Prison. That beer was piss-
warm, but it was still the best I ever had in my life. We sat and drank it and
felt the sun on our shoulders, and not even the expression of half
amusement, half-contempt on Hadley's face-as if he was watching apes
drink beer instead of men -could spoil it. It lasted twenty minutes, that beer-
break, and for those twenty minutes we felt like free men. We could have
been drinking beer and tarring the roof of one of our own houses.
Only Andy didn't drink. I already told you about his drinking habits. He
sat hunkered down in the shade, hands dangling between his knees,
watching us and smiling a little. It's amazing how many men remember him
that way, and amazing how many men were on that work-crew when Andy
Dufresne faced down Byron Hadley. I thought there were nine or ten of us,
but by 1955 there must have been two hundred of us, maybe more if you
believed what you heard.
So, yeah-if you asked me to give you a flat-out answer to the question of
whether I'm trying to tell you about a man or a legend that got made up
around the
man, like a pearl around a little piece of grit-I'd have to say that the
answer lies somewhere in between.
All I know for sure is that Andy Dufresne wasn't much like me or anyone
else I ever knew since I came inside. He brought in five hundred dollars
jammed up his back porch, but somehow that graymeat son of a bitch
managed to bring in something else as well. A sense of his own worth,
maybe, or a feeling that he would be the winner in the end or maybe it was
only a sense of freedom, even inside these goddamned grey walls. It was a
kind of inner light he carried around with him. I only knew him to lose that
light once, and that is also a part of this story.
By World Series time of 1950-this was the year Bobby Thompson hit his
famous home run at the end of the season, you will remember-Andy was
having no more trouble from the sisters. Stammas and Hadley had passed
the word. If Andy Dufresne came to either of them or any of the other
screws that formed a part of their coterie, and showed so much as a single
drop of blood in his underpants, every sister in Shawshank would go to bed
that night with a headache. They didn't fight it. As I have pointed out, there
was always an eighteen-year-old car thief or a firebug or some guy who'd
gotten his kicks handling little children. After the day on the plate-shop
roof, Andy went his way and the sisters went theirs.
He was working in the library then, under a tough old con named Brooks
Hatlen. Hatlen had gotten the job back in the late 20s because he had a
college education. Brooksie's degree was in animal husbandry, true enough,
but college educations in institutes of lower learning like The Shank are so
rare that it's a case of beggars not being able to be choosers.
In 1952 Brooksie, who had killed his wife and daughter after a losing
streak at poker back when Coolidge was President, was paroled. As usual,
the state in all its wisdom had let him go long after any chance he might
have had to become a useful part of society was gone. He was sixty-eight
and arthritic when he tottered out of the main gate in his Polish suit and his
French shoes, his parole papers in one 'and and a Greyhound bus ticket in
the other. He was crying when he left. Shawshank was his world. What lay
beyond its vails was as terrible to Brooks as the Western Seas had been to
superstitious 13th-century sailors. In prison, Brooksie had been a person of
some importance. He was the head librarian, an educated man. If he went to
the Kittery library and asked or a job, they wouldn't give him a library card.
I heard he lied in a home for indigent old folks up Freeport way in 1952,
and at that he lasted about six months longer than I thought he would. Yeah,
I guess the state got its own back on Brooksie, all right. They trained him to
like it inside the shithouse and then they threw him out.
Andy succeeded to Brooksie's job, and he was head librarian for twenty-
three years. He used the same force of will I'd seen him use on Byron
Hadley to get what he wanted for the library, and I saw him gradually turn
one small room (which still smelled of turpentine because it had been a
paint closet until 1922 and had never been properly aired) lined with
Reader's Digest Condensed Books and National Geographies into the best
prison library in New England.
He did it a step at a time. He put a suggestion box by the door and
patiently weeded out such attempts at humour as More Fuk-Boox Pleeze
and Escape in 10 EZ Lesions. He got sold of the things the prisoners
seemed serious about. He wrote to three major book clubs in New York and
got two of them, The Literary Guild and The Book of the Month Club, to
send editions of all their major selections to us at a special cheap rate. He
discovered a hunger for information on such snail hobbies as soap-carving,
woodworking, sleight of hand, and card solitaire. He got all the books he
could on such subjects. And those two jailhouse staples, Erie Stanley
Gardener and Louis L'Amour. Cons never seem to get enough of the
courtroom or the open range. And yes, he did keep a box of fairly spicy
paperbacks under the checkout desk, loaning them out carefully and making
sure they always got back. Even so, each new acquisition of that type was
quickly read to tatters. He began to write to the state senate in Augusta in
1954. Staminas was warden by then, and he used to pretend Andy was some
sort of mascot He was always in the library, shooting the bull with Andy,
and sometimes he'd even throw a paternal arm around Andy's shoulders or
give him a goose. He didn't fool anybody. Andy Dufresne was no one's
mascot.
He told Andy that maybe he'd been a banker on the outside, but that part
of his life was receding rapidly into his past and he had better get a hold on
the facts of prison life. As far as that bunch of jumped-up Republican
Rotarians in Augusta was concerned, there were only three viable
expenditures of the taxpayers' money in the field of prisons and corrections.
Number one was more walls, number two was more bars, and number three
was more guards. As far as the state senate was concerned, Stammas
explained, the folks in Thomastan and Shawshank and Pittsfield and South
Portland were the scum of the earth. They were there to do hard time, and
by God and Sonny Jesus, it was hard time they were going to do. And if
there were a few weevils in the bread, wasn't that just too fucking bad?
Andy smiled his small, composed smile and asked Stammas what would
happen to a block of concrete if a drop of water fell on it once every year
for a million years. Stammas laughed and clapped Andy on the back. 'You
got no million years, old horse, but if you did, I believe you'd do it with that
same little grin on your face. You go on and write your letters. I'll even mail
them for you if you pay for the stamps.' Which Andy did. And he had the
last laugh, although Stammas and Hadley weren't around to see it Andy's
requests for library funds were routinely turned down until 1960, when he
received a check for two hundred dollars-the senate probably appropriated
it in hopes that he would shut up and go away. Vain hope. Andy felt that he
had finally gotten one foot in the door and he simply redoubled his efforts;
two letters a week instead of one. In 1962 he got four hundred dollars, and
for the rest of the decade the library received seven hundred dollars a year
like clockwork. By 1971 that had risen to an even thousand. Not much
stacked up against what your average small-town library receives, I guess,
but a thousand bucks can buy a lot of recycled Perry Mason stories and Jake
Logan Westerns. By the time Andy left, you could go into the library
(expanded from its original paint-locker to three rooms), and find just about
anything you'd want. And if you couldn't find it, chances were good that
Andy could get it for you.
Now you're asking yourself if all this came about just because Andy told
Byron Hadley how to save the taxes on his windfall inheritance. The answer
is yes and no. You can probably figure out what happened for yourself.
Word got around that Shawshank was housing its very own pet financial
wizard. In the late spring and the summer of 1950, Andy set up two trust
funds for guards who wanted to assure a college education for their kids, he
advised a couple of others who wanted to take small fliers in common stock
(and they did pretty damn well, as things turned out, one of them did so
well he was able to take an early retirement two years later), and I'll be
damned if he didn't advise the warden himself, old Lemon Lips George
Dunahy, on how to go about setting up a tax-shelter for himself. That was
just before Dunahy got the bum's rush, and I believe he must have been
dreaming about all the millions his book was going to make him. By April
of 1951, Andy was doing the tax returns for half the screws at Shawshank,
and by 1952,
he was doing almost all of them. He was paid in what may be a prison's
most valuable coin: simple goodwill.
Later on, after Greg Stammas took over the warden's office, Andy
became even more important-but if I tried to tell you the specifics of just
how, I'd be guessing. There are some things I know about and others I can
only guess at. I know that there were some prisoners who received all sorts
of special considerations-radios in their cells, extraordinary visiting
privileges, things like that-and there were people on the outside who were
paying for them to have those privileges. Such people are known as 'angels'
by the prisoners. All at once some fellow would be excused from working
in the plate-shop on Saturday forenoons, and you'd know that fellow had an
angel out there who'd coughed up a chuck of dough to make sure it
happened. The way it usually works is that the angel will pay the bribe to
some middle-level screw, and the screw will spread the grease both up and
down the administrative ladder.
Then there was the discount auto repair service that laid Warden Dunahy
low, It went underground for a while and then emerged stronger than ever in
the late fifties. And some of the contractors that worked at the prison from
time to time were paying kickbacks to the top administration officials, I'm
pretty sure, and the same was almost certainly true of the companies whose
equipment was bought and installed in the laundry and the licence-plate
shop and the stamping-mill that was built in 1963.
By the late sixties there was also a booming trade in pills, and the same
administrative crowd was involved in turning a buck on that All of it added
up to a pretty good-sized river of illicit income. Not like the pile of
clandestine bucks that must fly around a really big prison like Attica or San
Quentin, but not peanuts, either. And money itself becomes a problem after
a while. You can't just stuff it into your wallet and then shell out a bunch of
crumpled twenties and dog-eared tens when you want a pool built in your
back yard or an addition put on your house. Once you get past a certain
point, you have to explain where that money came from and if your
explanations aren't convincing enough, you're apt to wind up wearing a
number yourself.
So there was a need for Andy's services. They took him out of the
laundry and installed him in the library, but if you wanted to look at it
another way, they never took him out of the laundry at all. They just set him
to work washing dirty money instead of dirty sheets. He funnelled it into
stocks, bonds, tax-free municipals, you name it. He told me once about ten
years after that day on the plate-shop roof that his feelings about what he
was doing were pretty clear, and that his conscience was relatively
untroubled. The rackets would have gone on with him or without him. He
had not asked to be sent to Shawshank, he went on; he was an innocent man
who had been victimized by colossal bad luck, not a missionary or a do-
gooder.
'Besides, Red,' he told me with that same half-grin, 'what I'm doing in
here isn't all that different from what I was doing outside. I'll hand you a
pretty cynical axiom: the amount of expert financial help an individual or
company needs rises in direct proportion to how many people that person or
business is screwing.
The people who run this place are stupid, brutal monsters for the most
part. The people who run the straight world are brutal and monstrous, but
they happen not to be quite as stupid, because the standard of competence
out there is a little higher. Not much, but a little.'
'But the pills,' I said. 'I don't want to tell you your business, but they
make me nervous. Reds, uppers, downers, nembutals-now they've got these
things they call Phase Fours. I won't get anything like that. Never have.'
'No,' Andy said. 'I don't like the pills either. Never have. But I'm not
much of a one for cigarettes or booze, either. But I don't push the pills. I
don't bring them in, and I don't sell them once they are in. Mostly it's the
screws who do that.'
'But-'
'Yeah, I know. There's a fine line there. What it comes down to, Red, is
some people refuse to get their hands dirty at all. That's called sainthood,
and the pigeons land on your shoulders and crap all over your shirt. The
other extreme is to take a bath in the dirt and deal any goddamned thing that
will turn a dollar-guns, switchblades, big H, what the hell. You ever have a
con come up to you and offer you a contract?' I nodded. It's happened a lot
of times over the years. You're, after all, the man who can get it. And they
figure if you can get them a nine-bolt battery for their transistor radio or a
carton of Luckies or a lid of reefer, you can put them in touch with a guy
who'll use a knife.
'Sure you have,' Andy agreed. 'But you don't do it. Because guys like us,
Red, we know there's a third choice. An alternative to staying simon-pure or
bathing in the filth and the slime. It's the alternative that grown-ups all over
the world pick. You balance off your walk through the hog-wallow against
what it gains you. You choose the lesser of two evils and try to keep your
good intentions in front of you. And I guess you judge how well you're
doing by how well you sleep at night and what your dreams are like.'
'Good intentions,' I said, and laughed. 'I know all about that, Andy. A
fellow can toddle right off to hell on that road.'
'Don't you believe it, ' he said, growing sombre. 'This is hell right here.
Right here in The Shank. They sell pills and I tell them what to do with the
money. But I've also got the library, and I know of over two dozen guys
who have used the books in here to help them pass their high school
equivalency tests. Maybe when they get out of here they'll be able to crawl
off the shitheap. When we needed that second room back in 1957, I got it
Because they want to keep me happy. I work cheap. That's the trade-off.'
'And you've got your own private quarters.'
'Sure. That's the way I like it.'
The prison population had risen slowly all through the fifties, and it damn
near exploded in the sixties, what with every college-age kid in America
wanting to try dope and the perfectly ridiculous penalties for the use of a
little reefer. But in all that time Andy never had a cellmate, except for a big,
silent Indian named Normaden (like all Indians in The Shank, he was called
Chief), and Normaden didn't last long. A lot of the other long-timers
thought Andy was crazy, but Andy just smiled. He lived alone and he liked
it that way and as he'd said, they liked to keep him happy. He worked
cheap.
Prison time is slow time, sometimes you'd swear it's stop-time, but it
passes. It passes. George Dunahy departed the scene in a welter of
newspaper headlines shouting SCANDAL and NEST-FEATHERING.
Stammas succeeded him, and for the next six years Shawshank was a kind
of living hell. During the reign of Greg Stammas, the beds in the infirmary
and the cells in the solitary wing were always full. One day in 1958 I
looked at myself in a small shaving mirror I kept in my cell and saw a forty-
year-old man looking back at me. A kid had come in back in 1938, a kid
with a big mop of carrotty red hair, half-crazy with remorse, thinking about
suicide. That kid was gone. The red hair was half grey and starting to
recede. There were crow's tracks around the eyes. On that day I could see
an old man inside, waiting his time to come out. It scared me. Nobody
wants to grow old in stir.
Stammas went early in 1959. There had been several investigative
reporters sniffing around, and one of them even did four months under an
assumed name, for a crime made up out of whole cloth. They were getting
ready to drag out SCANDAL and NEST-FEATHERING again, but before
they could bring the hammer down on him, Stammas ran. I can understand
that; boy, can I ever. If he had been tried and convicted, he could have
ended up right in here. If so, he might have lasted all of five hours. Byron
Hadley had gone two years earlier. The sucker had a heart attack and took
an early retirement. Andy never got touched by the Stammas affair. In early
1959 a new warden was appointed, and a new assistant warden, and a new
chief of guards. For the next eight months or so, Andy was just another con
again. It was during that period that Normaden, the big half-breed
Passamaquoddy, shared Andy's cell with him. Then everything just started
up again. Normaden was moved out, and Andy was living in solitary
splendour again. The names at the top change, but the rackets never do.
I talked to Normaden once about Andy. 'Nice fella,' Normaden said. It
was hard to make out anything he said because he had & harelip and a cleft
palate; his words all came out in a slush. 'I liked it there. He never made
fun. But he didn't want me there. I could tell.' Big shrug. 'I was glad to go,
me. Bad draught in that cell. All the time cold. He don't let nobody touch
his things. That's okay. Nice man, never made fun. But big draught.' Rita
Hay worth hung in Andy's cell until 1955, if I remember right Then it was
Marilyn Monroe, that picture from The Seven Year Itch where she's
standing over a subway grating and the warm air is flipping her skirt up.
Marilyn lasted until 1960, and she was considerably tattered about the
edges when Andy replaced her with Jayne Mansfield. Jayne was, you
should pardon the expression, a bust. After only a year or so she was
replaced with an English actress-might have been Hazel Court, but I'm not
sure. In 1966 that one came down and Raquel Welch went up for a record-
breaking six-year engagement in Andy's cell. The last poster to hang there
was a pretty country-rock singer whose name was Linda Ronstadt I asked
him once what the posters meant to him, and he gave me a peculiar,
surprised sort of look. 'Why, they mean the same thing to me as they do to
most cons, I guess,' he said. 'Freedom. You look at those pretty women and
you feel like you could almost not quite but almost step right through and
be beside them. Be free. I guess that's why I always liked Raquel Welch the
best It wasn't just her; it was that beach she was standing on. Looked like
she was down in Mexico somewhere. Someplace quiet, where a man would
be able to hear himself think. Didn't you ever feel that way about a picture,
Red? That you could almost step right through it?' I said I'd never really
thought of it that way. 'Maybe someday you'll see what I mean,' he said, and
he was right. Years later I saw exactly what he meant and when I did, the
first thing I thought of was Normaden, and about how he'd said it was
always cold in Andy's cell.
A terrible thing happened to Andy in late March or early April of 1963. I
have told you that he had something that most of the other prisoners, myself
included, seemed to lack. Call it a sense of equanimity, or a feeling of inner
peace, maybe even a constant and unwavering faith that someday the long
nightmare would end. Whatever you want to call it, Andy Dufresne always
seemed to have his act together.
There was none of that sullen desperation about him that seems to afflict
most lifers after a while; you could never smell hopelessness on him. Until
that late winter of '63. We had another warden by then, a man named
Samuel Norton. The Mather brothers, Cotton and Increase, would have felt
right at home with Sam Norton. So far as I know, no one had ever seen him
so much as crack a smile. He had a thirty-year pin from the Baptist Advent
Church of Eliot. His major innovation as the head of our happy family was
to make sure that each incoming prisoner had a New Testament. He had a
small plaque on his desk, gold letters inlaid in teakwood, which said
CHRIST IS MY SAVIOUR. A sampler on the wall, made by his wife, read:
HIS JUDGMENT COMETH AND THAT RIGHT EARLY. This latter
sentiment cut zero ice with most of us. We felt that the judgment had
already occurred, and we would be willing to testify with the best of them
that the rock would not hide us nor the dead tree give us shelter. He had a
Bible quote for every occasion, did Mr Sam Norton, and whenever you
meet a man like that, my best advice to you would be to grin big and cover
up your balls with both hands. There were less infirmary cases than in the
days of Greg Stammas, and so far as I know the moonlight burials ceased
altogether, but this is not to say that Norton was not a believer in
punishment. Solitary was always well populated. Men lost their teeth not
from beatings but from bread and water diets. It began to be called grain
and drain, as in I'm on the Sam Norton grain and drain train, boys.'
The man was the foulest hypocrite that I ever saw in a high position. The
rackets I told you about earlier continued to flourish, but Sam Norton added
his own new wrinkles. Andy knew about them all, and because we had
gotten to be pretty good friends by that time, he let me in on some of them.
When Andy talked about them, an expression of amused, disgusted wonder
would come over his face, as if he was telling me about some ugly,
predatory species of bug that has, by its very ugliness and greed, somehow
more comic than terrible.
It was Warden Norton who instituted the 'Inside-Out' program you may
have read about some sixteen or seventeen years back; it was even written
up in Newsweek. In the press it sounded like a real advance in practical
corrections and rehabilitation. There were prisoners out cutting pulpwood,
prisoners repairing bridges and causeways, prisoners constructing potato
cellars. Norton called it 'Inside-Out' and was invited to explain it to damn
near every Rotary and Kiwanis club in New England, especially after he got
his picture in Newsweek. The prisoners called it 'road-ganging', but so far
as I know, none of them were ever invited to express their views to the
Kiwanians or the Loyal Order of the Moose.
Norton was right in there on every operation, thirty-year church-pin and
all, from cutting pulp to digging storm-drains to laying new culverts on
state highways, there was Norton, skimming off the top. There were a
hundred ways to do it -men, materials, you name it. But he had it coming
another way, as well. The construction businesses in the area were deathly
afraid of Norton's Inside-Out programme, because prison labour is slave
labour, and you can't compete with that. So Sam Norton, he of the
Testaments and the thirty-year church-pin, was passed a good many thick
envelopes under the table during his fifteen-year tenure as Shawshank's
warden. And when an envelope was passed, he would either overbid the
project, not bid at all, or claim that all his Inside-Outers were committed
elsewhere. It has always been something of a wonder to me that Norton was
never found in the trunk of a Thunderbird parked off a highway somewhere
down in Massachusetts with his hands tied behind his back and half a dozen
bullets in his head. Anyway, as the old barrelhouse song says, My God, how
the money rolled in. Norton must have subscribed to the old Puritan notion
that the best way to figure out which folks God favours is by checking their
bank accounts.
Andy Dufresne was his right hand in all of this, his silent partner. The
prison library was Andy's hostage to fortune. Norton knew it, and Norton
used it. Andy told me that one of Norton's favourite aphorisms was One
hand washes the other. So Andy
gave good advice and made useful suggestions. I can't say for sure that he
hand-tooled Norton's Inside-Out program, but I'm damned sure he
processed the money for the Jesus-shouting son of a whore. He gave good
advice, made useful suggestions, the money got spread around, and son of
a bitch! The library would get a new set of automotive repair manuals, a
fresh set of Grolier Encyclopedias, books on how to prepare for the
Scholastic Achievement Tests. And, of course, more Erie Stanley Gardeners
and more Louis L'Amours. And I'm convinced that what happened
happened because Norton just didn't want to lose his good right hand. I'll go
further: it happened because he was scared of what might happen-what
Andy might say against him-if Andy ever got clear of Shawshank State
Prison.
I got the story a chunk here and a chunk there over a space of seven
years, some of it from Andy-but not all. He never wanted to talk about that
part of his life, and I don't blame him. I got parts of it from maybe half a
dozen different sources. I've said once that prisoners are nothing but slaves,
but they have that slave habit of looking dumb and keeping their ears open.
I got it backwards and forwards and in the middle, but I'll give it to you
from point A to point Z, and maybe you'll understand why the man spent
about ten months in a bleak, depressed daze. See, I don't think he knew the
truth until 1963, fifteen years after he came into this sweet little hell-hole.
Until he met Tommy Williams, I don't think he knew how bad it could get.
Tommy Williams joined our happy little Shawshank family in November
of 1962. Tommy thought of himself as a native of Massachusetts, but he
wasn't proud; in his twenty-seven years he'd done time all over New
England. He was a professional thief, and as you may have guessed, my
own feeling was that he should have picked another profession.
He was a married man, and his wife came to visit each and every week.
She had an idea that things might go better with Tommy-and consequently
better with their three-year-old and herself-if he got his high school degree.
She talked him into it, and so Tommy Williams started visiting the library
on a regular basis. For Andy, this was an old routine by then. He saw that
Tommy got a series of high school equivalency tests. Tommy would brush
up on the subjects he had passed in high-school -there weren't many-and
then take the test. Andy also saw that he was enrolled in a number of
correspondence courses covering the subjects he had failed in school or just
missed by dropping out. He probably wasn't the best student Andy ever
took over the jumps, and I don't know if he ever did get his high school
diploma, but that forms no part of my story. The important thing was that he
came to like Andy Dufresne very much, as most people did after a while.
On a couple of occasions he asked Andy 'what a smart guy like you is
doing in the joint' -a question which is the rough equivalent of that one that
goes 'What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?' But Andy wasn't
the type to tell him; he would only smile and turn the conversation into
some other channel. Quite normally, Tommy asked someone else, and when
he finally got the story, I guess he also got the shock of his young life. The
person he asked was his partner on the laundry's steam ironer and folder.
The inmates call this device the mangler, because that's exactly what it will
do to you if you aren't paying attention and get your bad self caught in it.
His partner was Charlie Lathrop, who had been in for about twelve years on
a murder charge. He was more than glad to reheat the details of the
Dufresne murder trial for Tommy; it broke the monotony of pulling freshly
pressed bedsheets out of the machine and tucking them into the basket. He
was just getting to the jury waiting until after lunch to bring in their guilty
verdict when the trouble whistle went off and the mangler grated to a stop.
They had been feeding in freshly washed sheets from the
Eliot Nursing Home at the far end; these were spat out dry and neatly
pressed at Tommy's and Charlie's end at the rate of one every five seconds.
Their job was to grab them, fold them, and slap them into the cart, which
had already been lined with brown paper.
But Tommy Williams was just standing there, staring at Charlie Lathrop,
his mouth unhinged all the way to his chest. He was standing in & drift of
sheets that had come through dean and which were now sopping up all the
wet muck on the floor-and in a laundry wetwash, there's plenty of muck.
So the head bull that day, Homer Jessup, comes rushing over, bellowing
his head off and on the prod for trouble. Tommy took no notice of him. He
spoke to Charlie as if old Homer, who had busted more heads than he could
probably count, hadn't been there. 'What did you say that golf pro's name
was?'
'Quentin,' Charlie answered back, all confused and upset by now. He later
said that the kid was as white as a truce flag, 'Glenn Quentin, I think.
Something like that, anyway -'
'Here now, here now,' Homer Jessup roared, his neck as red as a rooster's
comb. 'Get them sheets in cold water! Get quick! Get quick, by Jesus, you -'
'Glenn Quentin, oh my God,' Tommy Williams said, and that was all he
got to say because Homer Jessup, that least peaceable of men, brought his
billy down behind his ear. Tommy hit the floor so hard he broke off three of
his front teeth. When he woke up he was in solitary, and confined to same
for a week, riding a boxcar on Sam Norton's famous grain and drain train.
Plus a black mark on his report card.
That was in early February in 1963, and Tommy Williams went around to
six or seven other long-timers after he got out of solitary and got pretty
much the same story. I know; I was one of them. But when I asked him why
he wanted it, he just clammed up.
Then one day he went to the library and spilled one helluva big budget of
information to Andy Dufresne. And for the first and last time, at least since
he had approached me about the Rita Hayworth poster like a kid burying his
first pack of Trojans, Andy lost his cool only this time he blew it entirely.
I saw him later that day, and he looked like a man who has stepped on the
business end of a rake and given himself a good one, whap between the
eyes. His hands were trembling, and when I spoke to him, he didn't answer.
Before that afternoon was out he had caught up with Billy Hanlon, who was
the head screw, and set up an appointment with Warden Norton for the
following day. He told me later that he didn't sleep a wink all that night; he
just listened to a cold winter wind howling outside, watched the
searchlights go around and around, putting long, moving shadows on the
cement walls of the cage he had called home since Harry Truman was
President and tried to think it all out He said it was as if Tommy had
produced a key which fitted a cage in the back of his mind, a cage like his
own cell. Only instead of holding a man, that cage held a tiger, and that
tiger's name was Hope. Williams had produced the key that unlocked the
cage and the tiger was out, willy-nilly, to roam his brain.
Four years before, Tommy Williams had been arrested in Rhode Island,
driving a stolen car that was full of stolen merchandise. Tommy turned in
his accomplice, the DA played ball, and he got a lighter sentence two to
four, with time served. Eleven months after beginning his term, his old
cellmate got a ticket out and Tommy got a new one, a man named Elwood
Blatch. Blatch had been busted for burglary with a weapon and was serving
six to twelve.
'I never seen such a high-strung guy,' Tommy said. 'A man like that
should never want to be a burglar, specially not with a gun. The slightest
little noise, he'd go three feet into the air and come down shooting, more
likely than not One night he almost strangled me because some guy down
the hall was whopping on his cell bars with a tin cup. 'I did seven months
with bun, until they let me walk free. I got time served and time off, you
understand. I can't say we talked because you didn't, you know, exactly hold
a conversation with El Blatch. He held a conversation with you. He talked
all the time. Never shut up. If you tried to get a word in, he'd shake his fist
at you and roll his eyes. It gave me the cold chills whenever he done that.
Big tall guy he was, mostly bald, with these green eyes set way down deep
in the sockets. Jeez, I hope I never see him again. 'It was like a talkin' jag
every night When he grew up, the orphanages he run away from, the jobs
he done, the women he's fucked, the crap games he cleaned out I just let
him run an. My face ain't much, but I didn't want it, you know, rearranged
for me. 'According to him, he'd burgled over two hundred joints. It was hard
for me to believe, a guy like him who went off like a firecracker every time
someone cut a loud fart, but he swore it was true. Now listen to me, Red. I
know guys sometimes make things up after they know a thing, but even
before I knew about this golf pro guy, Quentin, I remember thinking that if
El Blatch ever burgled my house, and I found out about it later, I'd have to
count myself just about the luckiest motherfucker going still to be alive.
Can you imagine him in some lady's bedroom, sifting through her jool'ry
box, and she coughs in her sleep or turns over quick? It gives me the cold
chills just to think of something like that, I swear on my mother's name it
does.
'He said he'd killed people, too. People that gave him shit. At least that's
what he said. And I believed him. He sure looked like a man that could do
some killing. He was just so fucking high-strung! Like a pistol with a
sawed-off firing pin. I knew a guy who had a Smith & Wesson Police
Special with a sawed-off firing pin. It wasn't no good for nothing, except
maybe for something to jaw about. The pull on that gun was so light that it
would fire if this guy, Johnny Callahan, his name was, if he turned his
record-player on full volume and put it on top of one of the speakers. That's
how El Blatch was. I can't explain it any better. I just never doubted that he
had greased some people. 'So one night, just for something to say, I go:
"Who'd you kill?" Like a joke, you know. So he laughs and says, "There's
one guy doing time up Maine for these two people I killed. It was this guy
and the wife of the slob who's doing time. I was creeping their place and the
guy started to give me some shit."
'I can't remember if he ever told me the woman's name or not,' Tommy
went on. 'Maybe he did. But in New England, Dufresne's like Smith or
Jones in the rest of the country, because there's so many Frogs up here.
Dufresne, Lavesque, Ouelette, Poulin, who can remember Frog names? But
he told me the guy's name. He said the guy was Glenn Quentin and he was a
prick, a big rich prick, a golf pro. El said he thought the guy might have
cash in the house, maybe as much as five thousand dollars. That was a lot of
money back then, he says to me. So I go, "When was that?" And he goes,
"After the war. Just after the war."
'So he went in and he did the joint and they woke up and the guy gave
him some trouble. That's what El said. Maybe the guy just started to snore,
that's what I say. Anyway, El said Quentin was in the sack with some
hotshot lawyer's wife and they sent the lawyer up to Shawshank State
Prison. Then he laughs this big laugh. Holy Christ, I was never so glad of
anything as I was when I got my walking papers from that place.'
I guess you can see why Andy went a little wonky when Tommy told him
that story, and why he wanted to see the warden right away. Elwood Blatch
had been serving a six-to-twelve rap when Tommy knew him four years
before. By the time Andy heard all of this, in 1963, he might be on the
verge of getting out or already out. So those were the two prongs of the
spit Andy was roasting on-the idea that Blatch might still be in on one hand,
and the very real possibility that he might be gone like the wind on the
other. There were inconsistencies in Tommy's story, but aren't there always
in real life? Blatch told Tommy the man who got sent up was a hotshot
lawyer, and Andy was a banker, but those are two professions that people
who aren't very educated could easily get mixed up. And don't forget that
twelve years had gone by between the time Blatch was reading the
clippings about the trial and the time he told the tale to Tommy Williams.
He also told Tommy he got better than a thousand dollars from a footlocker
Quentin had in his closet, but the police said at Andy's trial that there had
been no sign of burglary. I have a few ideas about that. First, if you take the
cash and the man it belonged to is dead, how are you going to know
anything was stolen, unless someone else can tell you it was there to start
with? Second, who's to say Blatch wasn't lying about that part of it? Maybe
he didn't want to admit killing two people for nothing. Third, maybe there
were signs of burglary and the cops either overlooked them-cops can be
pretty dumb-or deliberately covered them up so they wouldn't screw the
DA's case. The guy was running for public office, remember, and he needed
a conviction to run on. An unsolved burglary-murder would have done him
no good at all. But of the three, I like the middle one best. I've known a few
Elwood Blatches in my time at Shawshank-the trigger-pullers with the
crazy eyes. Such fellows want you to think they got away with the
equivalent of the Hope Diamond on every caper, even if they got caught
with a two-dollar Timex and nine bucks on the one they're doing time for.
And there was one thing in Tommy's story that convinced Andy beyond a
shadow of a doubt. Blatch hadn't hit Quentin at random. He had called
Quentin 'a big rich prick', and he had known Quentin was a golf pro. Well,
Andy and his wife had been going out to that country club for drinks and
dinner once or twice a week for a couple of years, and Andy had done a
considerable amount of drinking there once he found out about his wife's
affair. There was a marina with the country club, and for a while in 1947
there had been a part-time grease-and-gas jockey working there who
matched Tommy's description of Elwood Blatch. A big tall man, mostly
bald, with deep-set green eyes. A man who had an unpleasant way of
looking at you, as though he was sizing you up. He wasn't there long, Andy
said. Either he quit or Briggs, the fellow in charge of the marina, fired him.
But he wasn't a man you forgot. He was too striking for that.
So Andy went to see Warden Norton on a rainy, windy day with big grey
clouds scudding across the sky above the grey walls, a day when the last of
the snow was starting to melt away and show lifeless patches of last year's
grass in the fields beyond the prison. The warden has a good-sized office in
the administration wing, and behind the warden's desk there's a door which
connects with the assistant warden's office. The assistant warden was out
that day, but a trustee was there. He was a half-lame fellow whose real
name I have forgotten; all the inmates, me included, called him Chester,
after Marshall Dillon's sidekick. Chester was supposed to be watering the
plants and dusting and waxing the floor. My guess is that the plants went
thirsty that day and the only waxing that was done happened because of
Chester's dirty ear polishing the keyhole plate of that connecting door.
He heard the warden's main door open and close and then Norton saying,
'Good morning, Dufresne, how can I help you?'
'Warden,' Andy began, and old Chester told us that he could hardly
recognize Andy's voice it was so changed. 'Warden there's something
something's happened to me that's that's so so I hardly know where to
begin.'
'Well, why don't you just begin at the beginning?' the warden said,
probably in his sweetest let's-all-turn-to-the-23rd-psalm-and-read-in-unison
voice. 'That usually works the best.'
And so Andy did. He began by refreshing Norton of the details of the
crime he had been imprisoned for. Then he told the warden exactly what
Tommy Williams had told him. He also gave out Tommy's name, which you
may think wasn't so wise in light of later developments, but I'd just ask you
what else he could have done, if his story was to have any credibility at all.
When he had finished, Norton was completely silent for some time. I can
just see him, probably tipped back in his office chair under the picture of
Governor Reed hanging on the wall, his fingers steepled, his liver lips
pursed, his brow wrinkled into ladder rungs halfway to the crown of his
head, his thirty-year pin gleaming mellowly.
'Yes,' he said finally. That's the damnedest story I ever heard. But I'll tell
you what surprises me most about it, Dufresne.'
'What's that, sir?'
'That you were taken in by it.'
'Sir? I don't understand what you mean.' And Chester said that Andy
Dufresne, who had faced down Byron Hadley on the plate-shop roof
thirteen years before, was almost floundering for words.
'Well now,' Norton said. 'It's pretty obvious to me that this young fellow
Williams is impressed with you. Quite taken with you, as a matter of fact.
He hears your tale of woe, and it's quite natural of him to want to cheer
you up, let's say. Quite natural. He's a young man, not terribly bright. Not
surprising he didn't realize what a state it would put you into. Now what I
suggest is -'
'Don't you think I thought of that?' Andy asked. 'But I'd never told
Tommy about the man working down at the marina. I never told anyone
that-it never even crossed my mind!
But Tommy's description of his cellmate and that man they're identical!'
'Well now, you may be indulging in a little selective perception there,'
Norton said with a chuckle. Phrases like that, selective perception, are
required learning for people in the penalogy and corrections business, and
they use them all they can.
"That's not it at all. Sir.'
"That's your slant on it,' Norton said, 'but mine differs. And let's
remember that I have only your word that there was such a man working at
the Falmouth Country Club back then.'
'No, sir,' Andy broke in again. 'No, that isn't true. Because-'
'Anyway,' Norton overrode him, expansive and loud, 'let's just look at it
from the other end of the telescope, shall we? Suppose -just suppose, now-
that there really was a fellow named Elwood Blotch.'
'Blatch,' Andy said tightly.
'Blatch, by all means. And let's say he was Thomas Williams's cellmate
in Rhode Island.
The chances are excellent that he has been released by now. Excellent.
Why, we don't even know how much time he might have done there before
he ended up with Williams, do we? Only that he was doing a six-to-twelve.'
'No. We don't know how much time he'd done. But Tommy said he was a
bad actor, a cut-up. I think there's a fair chance that he may still be in. Even
if he's been
released, the prison will have a record of his last known address, the
names of his relatives -'
'And both would almost certainly be dead ends.'
Andy was silent for a moment, and then he burst out: 'Well, it's a chance,
isn't
it?'
'Yes, of course it is. So just for a moment, Dufresne, let's assume that
Blatch exists and that he is still safely ensconced in the Rhode Island State
Penitentiary. Now what is he going to say if we bring this kettle of fish to
him in a bucket? Is he going to fall down on his knees, roll his eyes, and say
"I did it! I did it! By all means add a life term onto my burglary charge!"?'
'How can you be so obtuse?' Andy said, so low that Chester could barely
hear. But he heard the warden just fine.
'What? What did you call me?'
'Obtuse?' Andy cried. 'Is it deliberate?'
'Dufresne, you've taken five minutes of my time-no, seven-and I have a
very busy schedule today. So I believe we'll just declare this little meeting
closed and -'
'The country club will have all the old time-cards, don't you realize that?'
Andy shouted.
They'll have tax-forms and W-2s and unemployment compensation
forms, all with his name on them! There will be employees there now that
were there then, maybe Briggs himself! It's been fifteen years, not forever!
They'll remember him! They will remember Blatch! If I've got Tommy to
testify to what Blatch told him, and Briggs to testify that Blatch was there,
actually working at the country club, I can get a new trial! I can -'
'Guard! Guardl Take this man away!'
'What's the matter with you?' Andy said, and Chester told me he was very
nearly screaming by then. 'It's my life, my chance to get out, don't you see
that? And you won't make a single long-distance call to at least verify
Tommy's story? Listen, I'll pay for the call! I'll pay for -'
Then there was a sound of thrashing as the guards grabbed him and
started to drag him out 'Solitary,' Warden Norton said dryly. He was
probably-wearing his thirty-year pin as he said it 'Bread and water.'
And so they dragged Andy away, totally out of control now, still
screaming at the warden; Chester said you could hear him even after the
door was shut: 'It's my life! It's my life, don't you understand it's my life?'
Twenty days on the grain and drain train for Andy down there in solitary.
It was his second jolt in solitary, and his dust-up with Norton was his first
real black mark since he had joined our happy little family.
I'll tell you a little bit about Shawshank's solitary while we're on the
subject It's something of a throwback to those hardy pioneer days of the
early-to-mid- 1700s in Maine. In those days no one wasted much time
with such things as penalogy' and 'rehabilitation' and 'selective perception'.
In, those days, you were taken care of in terms of absolute black and white.
You were either guilty or innocent. If you were guilty, you were either hung
or put in gaol. And if you were sentenced to gaol, you did not go to an
institution. No, you dug your own gaol with a spade provided to you by the
Province of Maine. You dug it as wide and as deep as you could during the
period between sunup and sundown. Then, they gave you a couple of skins
and a bucket, and down you went Once down, the gaoler would bar the top
of your hole, throw down some grain or maybe a piece of maggoty meat
once or twice a week, and maybe there would be a dipperful; barley soup on
Sunday night You pissed in the
bucket, and you held up the same bucket for water when the gaoler came
around at six in the morning. When it rained, you used the bucket to bail out
your gaol-cell unless, that is, you wanted to drown like a rat in a
rainbarrel.
No one spent a long time 'in the hole', as it was called; thirty months was
an unusually long term, and so far as I've been able to tell, the longest term
ever spent from which an inmate actually emerged alive was served by the
so-called Durham Boy', a fourteen-year-old psychopath who castrated a
schoolmate with a piece of rusty metal. He did seven years, but of course he
went in young and strong.
You have to remember that for a crime that was more serious than petty
theft or blasphemy or forgetting to put a snotrag in your pocket when out of
doors on the Sabbath, you were hung. For low crimes such as those just
mentioned and for others like them, you'd do your three or six or nine
months in the hole and come out fishbelly white, cringing from the wide-
open spaces, your eyes half-blind, your teeth more than likely rocking and
rolling in their sockets from the scurvy, your feet crawling with fungus.
Jolly old Province of Maine. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.
Shawshank's Solitary Wing was nowhere as bad as that I guess. Things
come in three major degrees in the human experience, I think. There's good,
bad, and terrible. And as you go down into progressive darkness towards
terrible, it gets harder and harder to make subdivisions.
To get to Solitary Wing you were led down twenty-three steps to a
basement level where the only sound was the drip of water. The only light
was supplied by a series of dangling sixty-watt bulbs. The cells were keg-
shaped, like those wall-safes rich people sometimes hide behind a picture.
Like a safe, the round doorways were hinged, and solid instead of barred.
You get ventilation from above, but no light except for your own sixty-watt
bulb, which was turned off from a master-switch promptly at eight p. m., an
hour before lights-out in the rest of the prison. The wire wasn't in a wire
mesh cage or anything like that. The feeling was that if you wanted to exist
down there in the dark, you were welcome to it. Not many did but after
eight, of course, you had no choice. You had a bunk bolted to the wall and a
can with no toilet seat. You had three ways to spend your time: sitting,
shitting, or sleeping. Big choice. Twenty days could get to seem like a year.
Thirty days could seem like two, and forty days like ten. Sometimes you
could hear rats in the ventilation system. In a situation like that,
subdivisions of terrible tend to get lost.
If anything at all can be said in favour of solitary, it's just that you get
time to think. Andy had twenty days in which to think while he enjoyed his
grain and drain, and when he got out he requested another meeting with the
warden. Request denied. Such a meeting, the warden told him, would be
'counter-productive'. That's another of those phrases you have to master
before you can go to work in the prisons and corrections field.
Patiently, Andy renewed his request And renewed it And renewed it He
had changed, had Andy Dufresne. Suddenly, as that spring of 1963 bloomed
around us, there were lines in his face and sprigs of grey showing in his
hair. He had lost that little trace of a smile that always seemed to linger
around his mouth. His eyes stared out into space more often, and you get to
know that when a man stares that way, he is counting up the years served,
the months, the weeks, the days.
He renewed his request and renewed it He was patient He had nothing
but time. It got to be summer. In Washington, President Kennedy was
promising a fresh assault on poverty and on civil rights inequalities, not
knowing he had only half a year to live. In Liverpool, a musical group
called The Beatles was emerging as a force to be reckoned with in British
music, but I guess that no one Stateside had yet heard of
them. The Boston Red Sox, still four years away from what New
England folks call The Miracle of '67, were languishing in the cellar of the
American League. All of those things were going on out in a larger world
where people walked free.
Norton saw him near the end of June, and this conversation I heard about
from Andy himself some seven years later.
'If it's the money, you don't have to worry,' Andy told Norton in a low
voice. 'Do you think I'd talk that up? I'd be cutting my own throat I'd be just
as indictable as -
That's enough,' Norton interrupted. His face was as long and cold as a
slate gravestone.
He leaned back in his office chair until the back of his head almost
touched the sampler reading HIS JUDGMENT COMETH AND THAT
RIGHT EARLY.
'But-'
'Don't you ever mention money to me again,' Norton said. 'Not in this
office, not anywhere. Not unless you want to see that library turned back
into a storage room and paint-locker again. Do you understand?'
'I was trying to set your mind at ease, that's all.'
'Well now, when I need a sorry son of a bitch like you to set my mind at
ease, I'll retire. I agreed to this appointment because I got tired of being
pestered, Dufresne. I want it to stop. If you want to buy this particular
Brooklyn Bridge, that's your affair. Don't make it mine. I could hear crazy
stories like yours twice a week if I wanted to lay myself open to them.
Every sinner in this place would be using me for a crying towel. I had more
respect for you. But this is the end. The end. Have we got an
understanding?'
'Yes,' Andy said. 'But I'll be hiring a lawyer, you know.'
'What in God's name for?'
'I think we can put it together,' Andy said. 'With Tommy Williams and
with my testimony and corroborative testimony from records and
employees at the country club, I think we can put it together.'
'Tommy Williams is no longer an inmate of this facility.'
'What?'
'He's been transferred.'
'Transferred where?'
'Cashman.'
At that, Andy fell silent. He was an intelligent man, but it would have
taken an extraordinarily stupid man not to smelt deal all over that. Cashman
was a minimum-security prison far up north in Aroostook County. The
inmates pick a lot of potatoes, and that's hard work, but they are paid a
decent wage for their labour and they can attend classes at CVI, a pretty
decent vocational-technical institute, if they so desire. More important to a
fellow like Tommy, a fellow with a young wife and a child, Cashman had a
furlough program which meant a chance to live like a normal man, at least
on the weekends. A chance to build a model plane with his kid, have sex
with his wife, maybe go on a picnic.
Norton had almost surely dangled all of that under Tommy's nose with
only one string attached: not one more word about Elwood Blatch, not now,
not ever. Or you'll end up doing hard time in Thomaston down there on
scenic Route 1 with the real hard guys, and instead of having sex with your
wife you'll be having it with some old bull queer. 'But why?' Andy said.
'Why would -'
'As a favour to you,' Norton said calmly, 'I checked with Rhode Island.
They did have an inmate named Elwood Blatch. He was given what they
call a PP-provisional parole, another one of these crazy liberal programmes
to put criminals out on the streets. He's since disappeared.'
Andy said: 'The warden down there is he a friend of yours?'
Sam Norton gave Andy a smile as cold as a deacon's watchchain. 'We are
acquainted,' he said.
' Why?' Andy repeated. 'Can't you tell me why you did it? You knew I
wasn't going to talk about about anything you might have had going. You
knew that. So why? 'Because people like you make me sick,' Norton said
deliberately. 'I like you right where you are, Mr Dufresne, and as long as I
am warden here at Shawshank, you are going to be right here. You see, you
used to think that you were better than anyone else. I have gotten pretty
good at seeing that on a man's face. I marked it on yours the first time I
walked into the library. It might as well have been written on your forehead
in capital letters. That look is gone now, and I like that just fine. It is not
just that you are a useful vessel, never think that. It is simply that men like
you need to learn humility. Why, you used to walk around that exercise yard
as if it was a living room and you were at one of those cocktail parties
where the hellhound walk around coveting each others' wives and husbands
and getting swinishly drunk. But you don't walk around that way anymore.
And I'll be watching to see if you should start to walk that way again. Over
a period of years, I'll be watching you with great pleasure. Now get the hell
out of here.'
'Okay. But all the extracurricular activities stop now, Norton. The
investment counselling, the scams, the free tax advice. It all stops. Get H &
R Block to tell you how to declare your extortionate income.'
Warden Norton's face first went brick-red and then all the colour fell out
of it 'You're going back into solitary for that thirty days. Bread and water.
Another black mark. And while you're in, think about this: if anything that's
been going on should stop, the library goes. I will make it my personal
business to see that it goes back to what it was before you came here. And I
will make your life very hard. Very difficult You'll do the hardest time it's
possible to do. You'll lose that one-bunk Hilton down in Cellblock 5, for
starters, and you'll lose those rocks on the windowsill, and you'll lose any
protection the guards have given you against the sodomites. You will lose
everything. Clear?' I guess it was clear enough.
Time continued to pass-the oldest trick in the world, and maybe the only
one that really is magic. But Andy Dufresne had changed. He had grown
harder. That's the only way I can think of to put it He went on doing Warden
Norton's dirty work and he held onto the library, so outwardly things were
about the same. He continued to have his birthday drinks and his New
Year's Eve drinks; he continued to share out the rest of each bottle. I got
him fresh rock-polishing cloths from time to time, and in 1967 I got him a
new rock-hammer-the one I'd gotten him nineteen years ago had plumb
worn out Nineteen years! When you say it sudden like that, those three
syllables sound like the thud and double-locking of a tomb door. The rock-
hammer, which had been a ten-dollar item back then, went for twenty-two
by '67. He and I had a sad little grin over that. Andy continued to shape and
polish the rocks he found in the exercise yard, but the yard was smaller by
then; half of what had been there in 1950 had been asphalted over in 1962.
Nonetheless, he found enough to keep him occupied, I guess. When he had
finished with each rock he would put it carefully on his window ledge,
which faced east He told me he liked to look at them in the sun, the pieces
of the planet he had taken up from the dirt and shaped. Schists, quartzes,
granites. Funny little mica sculptures that were held together with airplane
glue. Various sedimentary conglomerates that were polished and cut in such
a way that you could see why Andy
called them 'millennium sandwiches'-the layers of different material that
had built up over a period of decades and centuries. Andy would give his
stones and his rock-sculptures away from time to time in order to make
room for new ones. He gave me the greatest number, I think-counting the
stones that looked like matched cufflinks, I had five. There was one of the
mica sculptures I told you about, carefully crafted to look like a man
throwing a javelin, and two of the sedimentary conglomerates, all the levels
showing in smoothly polished cross-section.
I've still got them, and I take them down every so often and think about
what a man can do, if he has time enough and the will to use it, a drop at a
time.
So, on the outside, at least, things were about the same. If Norton had
wanted to break Andy as badly as he had said, he would have had to look
below the surface to see the change. But if he had seen how different Andy
had become, I think Norton would have been well-satisfied with the four
years following his clash with Andy. He had told Andy that Andy walked
around the exercise yard as if he were at a cocktail party. That isn't the way
I would have put it, but I know what he meant. It goes back to what I said
about Andy wearing his freedom like an invisible coat, about how he never
really developed a prison mentality. His eyes never got that dull look. He
never developed the walk that men get when the day is over and they are
going back to their cells for another endless night-that flat-footed, hump-
shouldered walk. Andy walked with his shoulders squared and his step was
always light, as if he was heading home to a good home-cooked meal and a
good woman instead of to a tasteless mess of soggy vegetables, lumpy
mashed potato, and a slice or two of that fatty, gristly stuff most of the cons
called mystery meat that, and a picture of Raquel Welch on the wall. But
for those four years, although he never became exactly like the others, he
did become silent, introspective, and brooding. Who could blame him? So
maybe it was Warden Norton who was pleased at least, for a while.
His dark mood broke around the time of the 1967 World Series. That was
the dream year, the year the Red Sox won the pennant instead of placing
ninth, as the Las Vegas bookies had predicted. When it happened-when they
won the American League pennant- a kind of ebullience engulfed the whole
prison. There was a goofy sort of feeling that if the Dead Sox could come to
life, then maybe anybody could do it I can't explain that feeling now, any
more than an ex-Beatlemaniac could explain that madness, I suppose. But it
was real. Every radio in the place was tuned to the games as the Red Sox
pounded down the stretch. There was gloom when the Sox dropped a pair in
Cleveland near the end, and a nearly riotous joy when Rico Petrocelli put
away the pop fly that clinched it And then there was the gloom that came
when Lonborg was beaten in the seventh game of the Series to end the
dream just short of complete fruition. It probably pleased Norton to no end,
the son of a bitch. He liked his prison wearing sackcloth and ashes. But for
Andy, there was no tumble back down into gloom. He wasn't much of a
baseball fan anyway, and maybe that was why. Nevertheless, he seemed to
have caught the current of good feeling, and for him it didn't peter out again
after the last game of the Series. He had taken that invisible coat out of the
closet and put it on again. I remember one bright-gold fall day in very late
October, a couple of weeks after the World Series had ended. It must have
been a Sunday, because the exercise yard was full of men 'walking off the
week'-tossing a Frisbee or two, passing around a football, bartering what
they had to barter. Others would be at the long table in the Visitors' Hall,
under the watchful eyes of the screws, talking with their relatives, smoking
cigarettes, telling sincere lies, receiving their picked-over care packages.
Andy was squatting Indian-fashion against the wall, chunking two small
rocks together in his hands, his face turned up into the sunlight. It was
surprisingly warm, that sun, for a day so late in the year. 'Hello, Red,' he
called. 'Come on and sit a spell.' I did.
'You want this?' he asked, and handed me one of the two carefully
polished 'millennium sandwiches' I just told you about 'I sure do,' I said. 'It's
very pretty. Thank you.'
He shrugged and changed the subject 'Big anniversary coming up for you
next
year.'
I nodded. Next year would make me a thirty-year man. Sixty per cent of
my life spent in Shawshank Prison.
Think you'll ever get out?'
'Sure. When I have a long white beard and just about three marbles left
rolling around upstairs.'
He smiled a little and then turned his face up into the sun again, his eyes
closed. 'Feels good.'
'I think it always does when you know the damn winter's almost right on
top of
you.'
He nodded, and we were silent for a while.
'When I get out of here,' Andy said finally, 'I'm going where it's warm all
the time.' He spoke with such calm assurance you would have thought he
had only a month or so left to serve. 'You know where I'm goin', Red?'
'Nope.'
'Zihuatanejo,' he said, rolling the word softly from his tongue like music.
'Down in Mexico. It's a little place maybe twenty miles from Playa Azul
and Mexico Highway 37.
It's a hundred miles north-west of Acapulco on the Pacific Ocean. You
know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific?'
I told him I didn't.
'They say it has no memory. And that's where I want to finish out my life,
Red. In a warm place that has no memory.'
He had picked up a handful of pebbles as he spoke; now he tossed them,
one by one, and watched them bounce and roll across the baseball
diamond's dirt infield, which would be under a foot of snow before long.
'Zihuatanejo. I'm going to have a little hotel down there. Six cabanas
along the beach, and six more set further back, for the highway trade. I'll
have a guy who'll take my guests out charter fishing. There'll be a trophy
for the guy who catches the biggest marlin of the season, and I'll put his
picture up in the lobby. It won't be a family place. It'll be a place for people
on their honeymoons first or second varieties.'
'And where are you going to get the money to buy this fabulous place?' I
asked. 'Your stock account?'
He looked at me and smiled. 'That's not so far wrong,' he said.
'Sometimes you startle me, Red.'
'What are you talking about?'
There are really only two types of men in the world when it comes to bad
trouble,' Andy said, cupping a match between his hands and lighting a
cigarette. 'Suppose there was a house full of rare paintings and sculptures
and fine old antiques, Red? And suppose the guy who owned the house
heard that there was a monster of a hurricane headed right at it.
One of those two kinds of men just hopes for the best The hurricane will
change course, he says to himself. No right-thinking hurricane would ever
dare wipe out all these Rembrandts, my two Degas horses, my Jackson
Pollocks and my Paul Klees.
Furthermore, God wouldn't allow it. And if worst comes to worst, they're
insured. That's one sort of man. The other sort just assumes that hurricane is
going to tear right through the middle of his house. If the weather bureau
says the hurricane just changed course, this guy assumes it'll change back in
order to put his house on ground zero again. This second type of guy knows
there's no harm in hoping for the best as long as you're prepared for the
worst.'
I lit a cigarette of my own. 'Are you saying you prepared for the
eventuality?'
'Yes. I prepared for the hurricane. I knew how bad it looked. I didn't have
much time, but in the time I had, I operated. I had a friend-just about the
only person who stood by me-who worked for an investment company in
Portland. He died about six years ago.'
'Sorry.'
'Yeah.' Andy tossed his butt away. 'Linda and I had about fourteen
thousand dollars. Not a big bundle, but hell, we were young. We had our
whole lives ahead of us.' He grimaced a little, then laughed. 'When the shit
hit the fan, I started lugging my Rembrandts out of the path of the
hurricane. I sold my stocks and paid the capital gains tax just like a good
little boy. Declared everything. Didn't cut any corners.'
'Didn't they freeze your estate?'
'I was charged with murder, Red, not dead! You can't freeze the assets of
an innocent man-thank God. And it was a while before they even got brave
enough to charge me with the crime. Jim-my friend-and I, we had some
time. I got hit pretty good, just dumping everything like that. Got my nose
skinned. But at the time I had worse things to worry about than a small
skinning on the stock market.'
'Yeah, I'd say you did.'
'But when I came to Shawshank it was all safe. It's still safe. Outside
these walls, Red, there's a man that no living soul has ever seen face to face.
He has a Social Security card and a Maine driver's license. He's got a birth
certificate. Name of Peter Stevens. Nice, anonymous name, huh?'
'Who is he?' I asked. I thought I knew what he was going to say, but I
couldn't believe it.
'Me.'
'You're not going to tell me that you had time to set up a false identity
while the bulls were sweating you,' I said, 'or that you finished the job while
you were on trial for -'
'No, I'm not going to tell you that. My friend Jim was the one who set up
the false identity. He started after my appeal was turned down, and the
major pieces of identification were in his hands by the spring of 1950.'
'He must have been a pretty close friend,' I said. I was not sure how much
of this I believed- a little, a lot, or none. But the day was warm and the sun
was out, and it was one hell of a good story. 'All of that's one hundred per
cent illegal, setting up a false ID like that.'
'He was a close friend,' Andy said. 'We were in the war together. France,
Germany, the occupation. He was a good friend. He knew it was illegal, but
he also knew that setting up a false identity in this country is very easy and
very safe. He took my money-my money with all the taxes on it paid so the
IRS wouldn't get too
interested-and invested it for Peter Stevens. He did that in 1950 and
1951. Today it amounts to three hundred and seventy thousand dollars, plus
change.'
I guess my jaw made a thump when it dropped against my chest, because
he
smiled.
'Think of all the things people wish they'd invested in since 1950 or so,
and two or three of them will be things Peter Stevens was into. If I hadn't
ended up in here, I'd probably be worth seven or eight million bucks by
now. I'd have a Rolls and probably an ulcer as big as a portable radio.'
His hands went to the dirt and began sifting out more pebbles. They
moved gracefully, restlessly.
'I was hoping for the best and expecting the worst -nothing but that. The
false name was just to keep what little capital I had untainted. It was
lugging the paintings out of the path of the hurricane. But I had no idea that
the hurricane that it could go on as long as it has.'
I didn't say anything for a while. I guess I was trying to absorb the idea
that this small, spare man in prison grey next to me could be worth more
money than Warden Norton would make in the rest of his miserable life,
even with the scams thrown in.
'When you said you could get a lawyer, you sure weren't kidding,' I said
at last 'For that kind of dough you could have hired Clarence Darrow, or
whoever's passing for him these days. Why didn't you, Andy? Christ! You
could have been out of here like a rocket.'
He smiled. It was the same smile that had been on his face when he'd told
me he and his wife had had their whole lives ahead of them. 'No,' he said.
'A good lawyer would have sprung the Williams kid from Cashman
whether he wanted to go or not,' I said. I was getting carried away now.
'You could have gotten your new trial, hired private detectives to look for
that guy Blatch, and blown Norton out of the water to boot. Why not,
Andy?'
'Because I outsmarted myself. If I ever try to put my hands on Peter
Stevens's money from inside here, I'd lose every cent of it My friend Jim
could have arranged it, but Jim's dead. You see the problem?'
I saw it For all the good the money could do Andy, it might as well have
really belonged to another person. In a way, it did. And if the stuff it was
invested in suddenly turned bad, all Andy could do would be to watch the
plunge, to trace it day after day on the stocks-and-bonds page of the Press-
Herald. It's a tough life if you don't weaken, I guess. 'I'll tell you how it is,
Red. There's a big hayfield in the town of Buxton. You know where Buxton
is at, don't you?'
I said I did. It lies right next door to Scarborough.
"That's right And at the north end of this particular hayfield there's a rock
wall, right out of a Robert Frost poem. And somewhere along the base of
that wall is a rock that has no business in a Maine hayfield. It's a piece of
volcanic glass, and until 1947 it was a paperweight on my office desk. My
friend Jim put it in that wall. There's a key underneath it. The key opens a
safe deposit box in the Portland branch of the Casco Bank.'
'I guess you're in a pack of trouble,' I said. 'When your friend Jim died,
the IRS must have opened all of his safety deposit boxes. Along with the
executor of his will, of course.' Andy smiled and tapped the side of my
head. 'Not bad. There's more up there than marshmallows, I guess. But we
took care of the possibility that Jim might die while I was in the slam. The
box is in the Peter Stevens name, and once a year the
firm of lawyers that served as Jim's executors sends a check to the Casco
to cover the rental of the Stevens box.
'Peter Stevens is inside that box, just waiting to get out. His birth
certificate, his S. S. card, and his driver's license. The license is six years
out of date because Jim died six years ago, true, but it's still perfectly
renewable for a five-dollar fee. His stock certificates are there, the tax-free
municipals, and about eighteen bearer bonds in the amount of ten thousand
dollars each.' I whistled.
'Peter Stevens is locked in a safe deposit box at the Casco Bank in
Portland and Andy Dufresne is locked in a safe deposit box at Shawshank,'
he said. Tit for tat And the key that unlocks the box and the money and the
new life is under a hunk of black glass in a Buxton hayfield. Told you this
much, so I'll tell you something else, Red-for the last twenty years, give or
take, I have been watching the papers with a more than usual interest for
news of any construction projects in Buxton. I keep thinking that someday
soon I'm going to read that they're putting a highway through there, or
erecting a new community hospital, or building a shopping centre. Burying
my new life under ten feet of concrete, or spitting it into a swamp
somewhere with a big load of fill.' I blurted, 'Jesus Christ, Andy, if all of
this is true, how do you keep from going crazy?' He smiled. 'So far, all quiet
on the Western front.'
'But it could be years -'
'It will be. But maybe not as many as the state and Warden Norton think
it's going to be. I just can't afford to wait that long. I keep thinking about
Zihuatanejo and that small hotel. That's all I want from my life now, Red,
and I don't think that's too much to want. I didn't kill Glenn Quentin and I
didn't kill my wife, and that hotel it's not too much to want To swim and
get a tan and sleep in a room with open windows and space that's not too
much to want.' He slung the stones away.
'You know, Red,' he said in an offhand voice, 'a place like that I'd have
to have a man who knows how to get things.'
I thought about it for a long time. And the biggest drawback in my mind
wasn't even that we were talking pipedreams in a shitty little prison exercise
yard with armed guards looking down at us from their sentry posts. 'I
couldn't do it,' I said. 'I couldn't get along on the outside. I'm what they call
an institutional man now. In here I'm the man who can get it for you, yeah.
But out there, anyone can get it for you. Out there, if you want posters or
rock-hammers or one particular record or a boat-in-a-bottle model kit, you
can use the fucking Yellow Pages. In here, I'm the fucking Yellow Pages. I
wouldn't know how to begin. Or where.'
'You underestimate yourself,' he said. 'You're a selfeducated man, a self-
made man. A rather remarkable man, I think.'
'Hell, I don't even have a high school diploma.'
'I know that,' he said. 'But it isn't just a piece of paper that makes a man.
And it isn't just prison that breaks one, either.'
'I couldn't hack it outside, Andy. I know that.' He got up. 'You think it
over,' he said casually, just as the inside whistle blew. And he strolled off, as
if he was a free man who had just made another free man a proposition.
And for a while just that was enough to make me feel free. Andy could do
that. He could make me forget for a time that we were both lifers, at the
mercy of a hard-ass parole board and a psalm-singing warden who liked
Andy Dufresne right where he was. After all, Andy was a lap-dog who
could do tax-returns. What a wonderful animal! But by that night in my cell
I felt like a prisoner again. The whole idea seemed absurd, and that mental
image of blue water and white beaches seemed more cruel than foolish -it
dragged at my brain like a fishhook. I just couldn't wear that invisible coat
the way Andy did. I fell asleep that night and dreamed of a great glassy
black stone in the middle of a hayfield; a stone shaped like a giant
blacksmith's anvil. I was trying to rock the stone up so I could get the key
that was underneath. It wouldn't budge; it was just too damned big.
And in the background, but getting closer, I could hear the baying of
bloodhounds. Which leads us, I guess, to the subject of jailbreaks.
Sure, they happen from time to time in our happy little family. You don't
go over the wall, though, not at Shawshank, not if you're smart. The
searchlight beams go all night, probing long white fingers across the open
fields that surround the prison on three sides and the stinking marshland on
the fourth. Cons do go over the wall from time to time, and the searchlights
almost always catch them. If not, they get picked up trying to thumb a ride
on Highway 6 or Highway 99. If they try to cut across country, some farmer
sees them and just phones the location in to the prison. Cons who go over
the wall are stupid cons. Shawshank is no Canon City, but in a rural area a
man humping his ass across country in a grey pyjama suit sticks out like a
cockroach on a wedding cake. Over the years, the guys who have done the
best-maybe oddly, maybe not so oddly-are the guys who did it on the spur
of the moment. Some of them have gone out in the middle of a cartful of
sheets; a convict sandwich on white, you could say. There was a lot of that
when I first came in here, but over the years they have more or less closed
that loophole. Warden Norton's famous 'Inside-Out' program produced its
share of escapees, too. They were the guys who decided they liked what lay
to the right of the hyphen better than what lay to the left And again, in most
cases it was a very casual kind of thing. Drop your blueberry rake and stroll
into the bushes while one of the screws is having a glass of water at the
truck or when a couple of them get too involved in arguing over yards
passing or rushing on the old Boston Patriots.
In 1969, the Inside-Outers were picking potatoes in Sabbatus. It was the
third of November and the work was almost done. There was a guard
named Henry Pugh-and he is no longer a member of our happy little family,
believe me -sitting on the back bumper of one of the potato trucks and
having his lunch with his carbine across his knees when a beautiful (or so it
was told to me, but sometimes these things get exaggerated) ten-point buck
strolled out of the cold early afternoon mist Pugh went after it with visions
of just how that trophy would look mounted in his rec room, and while he
was doing it, three of his charges just walked away. Two were recaptured in
a Lisbon Falls pinball parlour. The third has not been found to this day.
I suppose the most famous case of all was that of Sid Nedeau. This goes
back to 1958, and I guess it will never be topped. Sid was out lining the
ball-field for a Saturday intramural baseball game when the three o'clock
inside whistle blew, signalling the shiftchange for the guards. The parking
lot is just beyond the exercise yard, on the other side of the electrically-
operated main gate. At three the gate opens and the guards coming on duty
and those going off mingle. There's a lot of back-slapping and bullyragging,
comparison of league bowling scores and the usual number of tired old
ethnic jokes.
Sid just trundled his lining machine right out through the gate, leaving a
three-inch baseline all the way from third base in the exercise yard to the
ditch on the far side of Route 6, where they found the machine overturned
in a pile of lime. Don't ask me how he did it He was dressed in his prison
uniform, he stood six-feet-two, and he was billowing clouds of lime-dust
behind him. All I can figure is that, it being Friday afternoon and all, the
guards going off were so happy to be going off, and the guards coming on
were so downhearted to be coming on, that the members of the former
group never got their heads out of the clouds and those in the latter never
got their noses off their shoetops and old Sid Nedeau just sort of slipped
out between the two.
So far as I know, Sid is still at large. Over the years, Andy Dufresne and I
had a good many laughs over Sid Nedeau's great escape, and when we
heard about that airline hijacking for ransom, the one where the guy
parachuted from the back door of the airplane, Andy swore up and down
that D B Cooper's real name was Sid Nedeau. 'And he probably had a
pocketful of baseline lime in his pocket for good luck,' Andy said. 'That
lucky son of a bitch.'
But you should understand that a case like Sid Nedeau, or the fellow who
got away clean from the Sabbatus potato-field crew, guys like that are
winning the prison version of the Irish Sweepstakes. Purely a case of six
different kinds of luck somehow jelling together all at the same moment A
stiff like Andy could wait ninety years and not get a similar break.
Maybe you remember, a ways back, I mentioned a guy named Henley
Backus, the washroom foreman in the laundry. He came to Shawshank in
1922 and died in the prison infirmary thirty-one years later. Escapes and
escape attempts were a hobby of his, maybe because he never quite dared to
take the plunge himself. He could tell you a hundred different schemes, all
of them crackpot, and all of them had been tried in the Shank at one time or
another. My favourite was the tale of Beaver Morrison, a b & e convict who
tried to build a glider from scratch in the plate-factory basement The plans
he was working from were in a circa-1900 book called The Modern Boy's
Guide to Fun and Adventure. Beaver got it built without being discovered,
or so the story goes, only to discover there was no door from the basement
big enough to get the damned thing out When Henley told that story, you
could bust a gut laughing, and he knew a dozen-no, two dozen -just as
funny.
When it came to detailing Shawshank bust-outs, Henley had it down
chapter and verse. He told me once that during his time there had been
better than four hundred escape attempts that he knew of. Really think
about that for a moment before you just nod your head and read on. Four
hundred escape attempts! That comes out to 12.9 escape attempts for every
year Henley Backus was in Shawshank and keeping track of them. The
Escape Attempt of the Month Club. Of course most of them were pretty
slipshod affairs, the sort of thing that ends up with a guard grabbing some
poor, sidling slob's arm and growling, 'Where do you think you're going,
you happy asshole?'
Henley said he'd class maybe sixty of them as more serious attempts, and
he included the 'prison break' of 1937, the year before I arrived at the
Shank. The new administration wing was under construction then and
fourteen cons got out, using construction equipment in a poorly locked
shed. The whole of southern Maine got into a panic over those fourteen
'hardened criminals', most of whom were scared to death and had no more
idea of where they should go than a jackrabbit does when it's headlight-
pinned to the highway with a big truck bearing down on it. Not one of those
fourteen got away. Two of them were shot dead-by civilians, not police
officers or prison personnel -but none got away.
How many had gotten away between 1938, when I came here, and that
day in October when Andy first mentioned Zihuatanejo to me? Putting my
information and Henley's together, I'd say ten. Ten that got away clean. And
although it isn't the kind of thing you can know for sure, I'd guess that at
least half of those ten are doing time in other institutions of lower learning
like the Shank. Because you do get institutionalized. When you take away a
man's freedom and teach him to live in a cell, he seems to lose his ability to
think in dimensions. He's like that jackrabbit I
mentioned, frozen in the oncoming lights of the truck that is bound to kill
it More often than not a con who's just out will pull some dumb job that
hasn't a chance in hell of succeeding and why? Because it'll get him back
inside. Back where he understands how things work.
Andy wasn't that way, but I was. The idea of seeing the Pacific sounded
good, but I was afraid that actually being there would scare me to death-the
bigness of it Anyhow, the day of that conversation about Mexico, and about
Mr Peter Stevens that was the day I began to believe that Andy had some
idea of doing a disappearing act. I hoped to God he would be careful if he
did, and still, I wouldn't have bet money on his chances of succeeding.
Warden Norton, you see, was watching Andy with a special close eye.
Andy wasn't just another deadhead with a number to Norton; they had a
working relationship, you might say. Also, he had brains and he had heart
Norton was determined to use the one and crush the other.
As there are honest politicians on the outside-ones who stay bought-there
are honest prison guards, and if you are a good judge of character and if you
have some loot to spread around, I suppose it's possible that you could buy
enough look-the-other-way to make a break. I'm not the man to tell you
such a thing has never been done, but Andy Dufresne wasn't the man who
could do it Because, as I've said, Norton was watching.
Andy knew it, and the screws knew it, too.
Nobody was going to nominate Andy for the Inside-Out program, not as
long as Warden Norton was evaluating the nominations. And Andy was not
the kind of man to try a casual Sid Nedeau type of escape.
If I had been him, the thought of that key would have tormented me
endlessly. I would have been lucky to get two hours' worth of honest
shuteye a night Buxton was less than thirty miles from Shawshank. So near
and yet so far.
I still thought his best chance was to engage a lawyer and try for the
retrial. Anything to get out from under Norton's thumb. Maybe Tommy
Williams could be shut up by nothing more than a cushy furlough
programme, but I wasn't entirely sure. Maybe a good old Mississippi
hardass lawyer could crack him and maybe that lawyer wouldn't even
have to work that hard. Williams had honestly liked Andy. Every now and
then I'd bring these points up to Andy, who would only smile, his eyes far
away, and say he was thinking about it.
Apparently he'd been thinking about a lot of other things, as well.
In 1975, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank. He hasn't been
recaptured, and I don't think he ever will be. In fact, I don't think Andy
Dufresne even exists anymore. But I think there's a man down in
Zihuatanejo, Mexico named Peter Stevens. Probably running a very new
small hotel in this year of our Lord 1977.
I'll tell you what I know and what I think; that's about all I can do, isn't it?
On 12 March 1975, the cell doors in Cellblock 5 opened at 6.30 a. m., as
they do every morning around here except Sunday. And as they do every
day except Sunday, the inmates of those cells stepped forward into the
corridor and formed two lines as the cell doors slammed shut behind them.
They walked up to the main cellblock gate, where they were counted off by
two guards before being sent on down to the cafeteria for a breakfast of
oatmeal, scrambled eggs, and fatty bacon.
All of this went according to routine until the count at the cellblock gate.
There should have been twenty-nine. Instead, there were twenty-eight.
After a call to the Captain of the Guards, Cellblock 5 was allowed to go to
breakfast.
The Captain of the Guards, a not half-bad fellow named Richard Gonyar,
and his assistant, a jolly prick named Dave Burkes, came down to Cellblock
5 right away.
Gonyar reopened the cell doors and he and Burkes went down the
corridor together, dragging their sticks over the bars, their guns out. In a
case like that what you usually have is someone who has been taken sick in
the night, so sick he can't even step out of his cell in the morning. More
rarely, someone has died or committed suicide.
But this time, they found a mystery instead of a sick man or a dead man.
They found no man at all. There were fourteen cells in Cellblock 5, seven to
a side, all fairly neat-restriction of visiting privileges is the penalty for a
sloppy cell at Shawshank-and all very empty.
Gonyar's first assumption was that there had been a miscount or a
practical joke. So instead of going off to work after breakfast, the inmates
of Cellblock 5 were sent back to their cells, joking and happy. Any break in
the routine was always welcome.
Cell doors opened; prisoners stepped in; cell doors closed. Some clown
shouting, 'I want my lawyer, I want my lawyer, you guys run this place just
like a frigging prison.'
Burkes: 'Shut up in there, or I'll rank you.'
The clown: 'I ranked your wife, Burkie,'
Gonyar: 'Shut up, all of you, or you'll spend the day in there.'
He and Burkes went up the line again, counting noses. They didn't have
to go
far.
'Who belongs in this cell?' Gonyar asked the rightside night guard.
'Andrew Dufresne,' the rightside answered, and that was all it took.
Everything stopped being routine right then. The balloon went up.
In all the prison movies I've seen, this wailing horn goes off when there's
been a break.
That never happens at Shawshank. The first thing Gonyar did was to get
in touch with the warden. The second thing was to get a search of the prison
going. The third was to alert the State Police in Scarborough to the
possibility of a breakout That was the routine. It didn't call for them to
search the suspected escapee's cell, and so no one did. Not then. Why would
they? It was a case of what you see is what you get. It was a small square
room, bars on the window and bars on the sliding door. There was a toilet
and an empty cot. Some pretty rocks on the windowsill.
And the poster, of course. It was Linda Ronstadt by then. The poster was
right over his bunk. There had been a poster there, in that exact same place,
for twenty-six years. And when someone-it was Warden Norton himself, as
it turned out, poetic justice if there ever was any-looked behind it, they got
one hell of a shock.
But that didn't happen until 6.30 that night, almost twelve hours after
Andy had been reported missing, probably twenty hours after he had
actually made his escape.
Norton hit the roof.
I have it on good authority-Chester, the trustee, who was waxing the hall
floor in the Admin Wing that day. He didn't have to polish any keyplates
with his ear that day; he said you could hear the warden clear down to
Records & Files as he chewed on Rich Gonyar's ass.
'What do you mean, you're "satisfied he's not on the prison grounds"?
What does that mean? It means you didn't find him! You better find him!
You better! Because I want him! Do you hear me? I want him!'
Gonyar said something.
'Didn't happen on your shift? That's what you say. So far as I can tell, no
one knows when it happened. Or how. Or if it really did. Now, I want him
in my office by three o'clock this afternoon, or some heads are going to roll.
I can promise you that, and I always keep my promises.'
Something else from Gonyar, something that seemed to provoke Norton
to even greater rage.
'No? Then look at this! Look at this! You recognize it? Last night's tally
for Cellblock 5.
Every prisoner accounted for! Dufresne was locked up last night at nine
and it is impossible for him to be gone now! It is impossible! Now you find
him!"
But at six that evening Andy was still among the missing, Norton himself
stormed down to Cellblock 5, where the rest of us had been locked up all of
that day. Had we been questioned? We had spent most of that long day
being questioned by harried screws who were feeling the breath of the
dragon on the backs of their necks. We all said the same thing: we had seen
nothing, heard nothing. And so far as I know, we were all telling the truth. I
know that I was. All we could say was that Andy had indeed been in his cell
at the time of the lock-in, and at lights-out an hour later.
One wit suggested that Andy had poured himself out through the
keyhole. The suggestion earned the guy four days in solitary. They were
uptight.
So Norton came down-stalked down-glaring at us with blue eyes nearly
hot enough to strike sparks from the tempered steel bars of our cages. He
looked at us as if he believed we were all in on it. Probably he did believe
it.
He went into Andy's cell and looked around. It was just as Andy had left
it, the sheets of his bunk turned back but without looking slept-in. Rocks on
the windowsill but not all of them. The ones he liked best he took with
him.
'Rocks,' Norton hissed, and swept them off the window-ledge with a
clatter. Gonyar, already four hours overtime, winced but said nothing.
Norton's eyes fell on the Linda Ronstadt poster. Linda was looking back
over her shoulder, her hands tucked into the back pockets of a very tight
pair of fawn-coloured slacks. She was wearing a halter and she had a deep
California tan. It must have offended the hell out of Norton's Baptist
sensibilities, that poster. Watching him glare at it, I remembered what Andy
had once said about feeling he could almost step through the picture and be
with the girl.
In a very real way, that was exactly what he did-as Norton was only
seconds from discovering.
'Wretched thing!' he grunted, and ripped the poster from the wall with a
single swipe of his hand.
And revealed the gaping, crumbled hole in the concrete behind it. Gonyar
wouldn't go in.
Norton ordered him-God, they must have heard Norton ordering Rich
Gonyar to go in there all over the prison-and Gonyar just refused him,
point-blank.
'I'll have your job for this!' Norton screamed. He was as hysterical as a
woman having a hot-flash. He had utterly blown his cool. His neck had
turned a rich, dark red, and two veins stood out, throbbing, on his forehead.
'You can count on it, you you Frenchman!
I'll have your job and I'll see to it that you never get another one in any
prison system in New England!'
Gonyar silently held out his service pistol to Norton, butt first. He'd had
enough. He was four hours overtime, going on five, and he'd just had
enough. It was as if Andy's defection from our happy little family had
driven Norton right over the
edge of some private irrationality that had been there for a long time
certainly he was crazy that night.
I don't know what that private irrationality might have been, of course.
But I do know that there were twenty-eight cons listening to Norton's little
dust-up with Rich Gonyar that evening as the last of the light faded from a
dull late winter sky, all of us hard-timers and long-line riders who had seen
the administrators come and go, the hard-asses and the candy-asses alike,
and we all knew that Warden Samuel Norton had just passed what the
engineers like to call 'the breaking strain'.
And by God, it almost seemed to me that somewhere I could heard Andy
Dufresne laughing.
Norton finally got a skinny drink, of water on the night shift to go into
that hole that had been behind Andy's poster of Linda Ronstadt. The skinny
guard's name was Rory Tremont, and he was not exactly a ball of fire in the
brains department. Maybe he thought he was going to win a Bronze Star or
something. As it turned out, it was fortunate that Norton got someone of
Andy's approximate height and build to go in there; if they had sent a big-
assed fellow-as most prison guards seem to be-the guy would have stuck in
there is sure as God made green grass and he might be there still.
Tremont went in with a nylon filament rope, which someone had found in
the trunk of his car, tied around his waist and a big six-battery flashlight in
one hand. By then Gonyar, who had changed his mind about quitting and
who seemed to be the only one there still able to think clearly, had dug out a
set of blueprints. I knew well enough what they showed him- a wall which
looked, in cross-section, like a sandwich. The entire wall was ten feet thick.
The inner and outer sections were each about four feet thick. In the centre
was two feet of pipe-space, and you want to believe that was the meat of the
thing in more ways than one.
Tremont's voice came out of the hole, sounding hollow and dead.
'Something smells awful in here, Warden.'
'Never mind that! Keep going.'
Tremont's lower legs disappeared into the hole. A moment iater his feet
were gone, too.
His light flashed dimly back and forth.
'Warden, it smells pretty damn bad.'
'Never mind, I said!' Norton cried.
Dolorously, Tremont's voice floated back: 'Smells like shit. Oh God,
that's what it is, it's shit, oh my God lemme outta here I'm gonna blow my
groceries oh shit it's shit oh my Gawwwwwd-And then came the
unmistakable sound of Rory Tremont losing his last couple of meals.
Well, that was it for me. I couldn't help myself. The whole day-hell no,
the last thirty years-all came up on me at once and I started laughing fit to
split, a laugh such as I'd never had since I was a free man, the kind of laugh
I never expected to have inside these grey walls. And oh dear God didn't it
feel good!
'Get that man out of here!' Warden Norton was screaming, and I was
laughing so hard I didn't know if he meant me or Tremont I just went on
laughing and kicking my feet and holding onto my belly. I couldn't have
stopped if Norton had threatened to shoot me dead-bang on the spot. 'Get
him OUT!'
Well, friends and neighbours, I was the one who went Straight down to
solitary, and there I stayed for fifteen days. A long shot. But every now and
then I'd think about poor old not-too-bright Rory Tremont bellowing oh shit
it's shit, and then I'd think about Andy Dufresne heading south in his own
car, dressed in a nice suit,
and I'd just have to laugh. I did that fifteen days in solitary practically
standing on my head Maybe because half of me was with Andy Dufresne,
Andy Dufresne who had waded in shit and came out clean on the other side,
Andy Dufresne, headed for the Pacific.
I heard the rest of what went on that night from half a dozen sources.
There wasn't all that much, anyway. I guess that Rory Tremont decided he
didn't have much left to lose after he'd lost his lunch and dinner, because he
did go on. There was no danger of falling down the pipe-shaft between the
inner and outer segments of the cellblock wall; it was so narrow that
Tremont actually had to wedge himself down. He said later that he could
only take half-breaths and that he knew what it would be like to be buried
alive.
What he found at the bottom of the shaft was a master sewer-pipe which
served the fourteen toilets in Cellblock 5, a porcelain pipe that had been laid
thirty-three years before. It had been broken into. Beside the jagged hole in
the pipe, Tremont found Andy's rock-hammer.
Andy had gotten free, but it hadn't been easy.
The pipe was even narrower than the shaft Tremont had just descended; it
had a two-foot bore. Rory Tremont didn't go in, and so far as I know, no one
else did, either. It must have been damn near unspeakable. A rat jumped out
of the pipe as Tremont was examining the hole and the rock-hammer, and
he swore later that it was nearly as big as a cocker spaniel pup. He went
back up the crawlspace to Andy's cell like a monkey on a stick.
Andy had gone into that pipe. Maybe he knew that it emptied into a
stream five hundred yards beyond the prison on the marshy western side. I
think he did. The prison blueprints were around, and Andy would have
found a way to look at them. He was a methodical cuss. He would have
known or found out that the sewerpipe running out of Cellblock 5 was the
last one in Shawshank not hooked into the new waste-treatment plant, and
he would have known it was do it by mid-1975 or do it never, because in
August they were going to switch us over to the new waste-treatment plant,
too.
Five hundred yards. The length of five football fields. Just shy of a mile.
He crawled that distance, maybe with one of those small Penlites in his
hand, maybe with nothing but a couple of books of matches. He crawled
through foulness that I either can't imagine or don't want to imagine. Maybe
the rats scattered in front of him, or maybe they went for him the way such
animals sometimes will when they've had a chance to grow bold in the dark.
He must have had just enough clearance at the shoulders to keep moving,
and he probably had to shove himself through the places where the lengths
of pipe were joined.
If it had been me, the claustrophobia would have driven me mad a dozen
times over. But he did it At the far end of the pipe they found a set of
muddy footprints leading out of the sluggish, polluted creek the pipe fed
into. Two miles from there a search party found his prison uniform-that was
a day later.
The story broke big in the papers, as you might guess, but no one within
a fifteen-mile radius of the prison stepped forward to report a stolen car,
stolen clothes, or a naked man in the moonlight There was not so much as a
barking dog in a farmyard. He came out of the sewerpipe and he
disappeared like smoke.
But I am betting he disappeared in the direction of Buxton.
Three months after that memorable day, Warden Norton resigned. He was
a broken man, it gives me great pleasure to report. The spring was gone
from his step. On his last day he shuffled out with his head down like an old
con shuffling down to
the infirmary for his codeine pills. It was Gonyar who took over, and to
Norton that must have seemed like the unkindest cut of all. For all I know,
Sam Norton is down there in Eliot now, attending services at the Baptist
church every Sunday, and wondering how the hell Andy Dufresne ever
could have gotten the better of him.
I could have told him; the answer to the question is simplicity itself.
Some have got it, Sam. And some don't, and never will.
That's what I know; now I'm going to tell you what I think. I may have it
wrong on some of the specifics, but I'd be willing to bet my watch and
chain that I've got the general outline down pretty well. Because, with Andy
being the sort of man that he was, there's only one or two ways that it could
have been. And every now and then, when I think it out, I think of
Normaden, that half-crazy Indian. 'Nice fella,' Normaden had said after
celling with Andy for six or eight months. 'I was glad to go, me. All the
time cold. He don't let nobody touch his things. That's okay. Nice man,
never make fun. But big draught.' Poor crazy Normaden. He knew more
than all the rest of us, and he knew it sooner. And it was eight long months
before Andy could get him out of there and have the cell to himself again. If
it hadn't been for the eight months Normaden had spent with him after
Warden Norton first came in, I do believe that Andy would have been free
before Nixon resigned.
I believe now that it began in 1949, way back then-not with the rock-
hammer, but with the Rita Hayworth poster. I told you how nervous he
seemed when he asked for that, nervous and filled with suppressed
excitement. At the time I thought it was just embarrassment, that Andy was
the sort of guy who'd never want someone else to know that he had feet of
clay and wanted a woman even if it was only a fantasy-woman. But I
think now that I was wrong. I think now that Andy's excitement came from
something else altogether.
What was responsible for the hole that Warden Norton eventually found
behind the poster of a girl that hadn't even been born when that photo of
Rita Hayworth was taken?
Andy Dufresne's perseverance and hard work, yeah- I don't take any of
that away from him. But there were two other elements in the equation: a
lot of luck, and WPA concrete.
You don't need me to explain the luck, I guess. The WPA concrete I
checked out for myself. I invested some time and a couple of stamps and
wrote first to the University of Maine History Department and then to a
fellow whose address they were able to give me.
This fellow had been foreman of the WPA project that built the
Shawshank Max Security Wing.
The wing, which contains Cellblocks 3, 4, and 5, was built in the years
193437. Now, most people don't think of cement and concrete as
'technological developments', the way we think of cars and oil furnaces and
rocket-ships, but they really are. There was no modern cement until 1870 or
so, and no modern concrete until after the turn of the century. Mixing
concrete is as delicate a business as making bread. You can get it too watery
or not watery enough. You can get the sand-mix too thick or too thin, and
the same is true of the gravel-mix. And back in 1934, the science of mixing
the stuff was a lot less sophisticated than it is today.
The walls of Cellblock 5 were solid enough, but they weren't exactly dry
and toasty. As a matter of fact, they were and are pretty damned dank. After
a long wet spell they would sweat and sometimes even drip. Cracks had a
way of appearing, some an inch deep, and were routinely mortared over.
Now here comes Andy Dufresne into Cellblock 5. He's a man who
graduated from the University of Maine's school of business, but he's also a
man who took two or three geology courses along the way. Geology had, in
fact, become his chief hobby. I imagine it appealed to his patient,
meticulous nature. A ten-thousand-year ice age here. A million years of
mountain-building there. Tectonic plates grinding against each other deep
under the earth's skin over the millennia. Pressure. Andy told me once that
all of geology is the study of pressure.
And time, of course.
He had time to study those walls. Plenty of time. When the cell door
slams and the lights go out, there's nothing else to look at.
First-timers usually had a hard time adjusting to the confinement of
prison life. They get screw-fever, they have to be hauled down to the
infirmary and sedated couple of times before they get on the beam. It's not
unusual to hear some new member of our happy little family bang on the
bars of his cell and screaming to be let out before the cries have gone on
for long, the chant starts up along the cellblock: 'Fresh fish, hey little fishie,
fresh fish, fresh fish, got fresh fish today!'
Andy didn't flip out like that when he came to the Shank in 1948, but
that's not to say that he didn't feel many of same things. He may have come
close to madness; some and some go sailing right over the edge. Old life
blown away in the wink of an eye, indeterminate nightmare stretching out
ahead, a long season in hell.
So what did he do, I ask you? He searched almost desperately for
something to divert his restless mind. Oh. There are all sorts of ways to
divert yourself, even in prison; it seems like the human mind is full of an
infinite number of possibilities when it comes to diversion. I told you about
the sculptor and his Three Ages of Jesus. There were coin collectors who
were always losing their collections to thieves, stamp collectors, one fellow
who had postcards from thirty-five different countries-and let me tell you,
he would have turned out your lights if he'd caught you diddling with his
postcards.
Andy got interested in rocks. And the walls of his cell.
I think that his initial intention might have been to do no more than to
carve his initials into the wall where the poster of Rita Hayworth would
soon be hanging. His initials, or maybe a few lines from some poem.
Instead, what he found was that interestingly weak concrete. Maybe he
started to carve his initials and a big chunk of the wall fell out I can see
him, lying there on his bunk, looking at that broken chunk of concrete,
turning it over in his hands. Never mind the wreck of your whole life, never
mind that you got railroaded into this place by a whole trainload of bad
luck. Let's forget all that and look at this piece of concrete. Some months
further along he might have decided it would be fun to see how much of
that wall he could take out. But you can't just start digging into your wall
and then, when the weekly inspection (or one of the surprise inspections
that are always turning up interesting caches of booze, drugs, dirty pictures,
and weapons) comes around, say to the guard: This? Just excavating a little
hole in my cell wall. Not to worry, my good man.'
No, he couldn't have that. So he came to me and asked if I could get him
a Rita Hayworth poster. Not a little one but a big one.
And, of course, he had the rock-hammer. I remember thinking when I got
him that gadget back in '48 that it would take a man six hundred years to
burrow through the wall with it. True enough. But Andy went right through
the wall -even with the soft concrete, it took him two rock-hammers and
twenty-seven years to hack a hole big enough to get his slim body through
four feet of it Of course he lost most of one of those years to Normaden,
and he could only work at night, preferably late at night, when almost
everybody is asleep-including the guards who work the night shift. But I
suspect the thing which slowed him down the most was getting rid of the
wall as he took it out He could muffle the sound of his work by wrapping
the head of his hammer in rock-polishing cloths, but what to do with the
pulverized concrete and the occasional chunks that came out whole? I think
he must have broken up the chunks into pebbles and
I remembered the Sunday after I had gotten him the rock-hammer. I
remember watching him walk across the exercise yard, his face puffy from
his latest go-round with the sisters. I saw him stoop, pick up a pebble and
it disappeared up his sleeve. That inside sleeve-pocket is an old prison trick.
Up your sleeve or just inside the cuff of your pants. And I have another
memory, very strong but unfocused, maybe something I saw more than
once. This memory is of Andy Dufresne walking across the exercise yard
on a hot summer day when the air was utterly still. Still, yeah except for
the little breeze that seemed to be blowing sand around Andy Dufresne's
feet.
So maybe he had a couple of cheaters in his pants below the knees. You
loaded the cheaters up with fill and then just strolled around, your hands in
your pockets, and when you feel safe and unobserved, you gave the pockets
a little twitch. The pockets, of course, are attached by string or strong thread
to the cheaters. The fill goes cascading out of your pantslegs as you walk.
The World War II POWS who were trying to tunnel out used the dodge.
The years went past and Andy brought his wall out to the exercise yard
cupful by cupful. He played the game with administrator after
administrator, and they thought it was because he wanted to keep the library
growing. I have no doubt that was part of it, but the main thing Andy
wanted was to keep cell 14 in Cellblock 5 a single occupancy. I doubt if he
had any real plans or hopes of breaking out, at least not at first. He probably
assumed the wall was ten feet of solid concrete, and that if he succeeded in
boring all the way through it, he'd come out thirty feet over the exercise
yard. But like I say, I don't think he was worried overmuch about breaking
through. His assumption could have run this way: I'm only making a foot of
progress every seven years or so; therefore, it would take me seventy years
to break through; that would make me one hundred and seven years old.
Here's a second assumption I would have made, had I been Andy: that
eventually I would be caught and get a lot of solitary time, not to mention a
very large black mark on my record. After all, there was the regular weekly
inspection and a surprise toss-which usually came at night-every second
week or so. He must have decided that things couldn't go on for long.
Sooner or later, some screw was going to peek behind Rita Hayworth just to
make sure Andy didn't have a sharpened spoon-handle or some marijuana
reefers Scotch-taped to the wall.
And his response to that second assumption must have been to hell with
it. Maybe he even made a game out of it. How far in can I get before they
find out? Prison is a goddam boring place, and the chance or being
surprised by an unscheduled inspection in the middle of the night while he
had his poster unstuck probably added some spice to his life during the
early years.
And I do believe it would have been impossible for him to get away just
on dumb luck. Not for twenty-seven years. Nevertheless, I have to believe
that for the first two years -until mid-May of 1950, when he helped Byron
Hadley get around the tax on his windfall inheritance-that's exactly what he
did get by on.
Or maybe he had something more than dumb luck going for him even
back then. He had money, and he might have been slipping someone a little
squeeze every
week to take it easy on him. Most guards will go along with that if the
price is right; it's money in their pockets and the prisoner gets to keep his
whack-off pictures or his tailormade cigarettes. Also, Andy was a model
prisoner-quiet, well-spoken, respectful, non-violent. It's the crazies and the
stampeders that get their cells turned upside-down at least once every six
months, their mattresses unzipped, their pillows taken away and cut open,
the outflow pipe from their toilets carefully probed.
Then, in 1950, Andy became something more than a model prisoner. In
1950, he became a valuable commodity, a murderer who did tax returns as
well as H & R Block. He gave gratis estate-planning advice, set up tax-
shelters, filled out loan applications (sometimes creatively). I can remember
him sitting behind his desk in the library, patiently going over a car-loan
agreement paragraph by paragraph with a screwhead who wanted to buy a
used DeSoto, telling the guy what was good about the agreement and what
was bad about it, explaining to him that it was possible to shop for a loan
and not get hit quite so bad, steering him away from the finance companies
which in those days were sometimes little better than legal loan-sharks.
When he'd finished, the screwhead started to put out his hand and then
drew it back to himself quickly. He'd forgotten for a moment, you see, that
he was dealing with a mascot, not a man.
Andy kept up on the tax laws and the changes in the stock market, and so
his usefulness didn't end after he'd been in cold storage for a while, as it
might have done. He began to get his library money, his running war with
the sisters had ended, and nobody tossed his cell very hard. He was a good
nigger.
Then one day, very late in the going-perhaps around October of 1967-the
long-time hobby suddenly turned into something else. One night while he
was in the hole up to his waist with Raquel Welch hanging down over his
ass, the pick end of his rock-hammer must have suddenly sunk into concrete
past the hilt.
He would have dragged some chunks of concrete back, but maybe he
heard others falling down into that shaft, bouncing back and forth, clinking
off that standpipe. Did he know by then that he was going to come upon
that shaft, or was he totally surprised? I don't know. He might have seen the
prison blueprints by then or he might not have. If not, you can be damned
sure he found a way to look at them not long after. All at once he must have
realized that, instead of just playing a game, he was playing for high
stakes in terms of his own life and his own future, the highest. Even then
he couldn't have known for sure, but he must have had a pretty good idea
because it was right around then that he talked to me about Zihuatanejo for
the first time. All of a sudden, instead of just being a toy, that stupid hole in
the wall became his master-if he knew about the sewer-pipe at the bottom,
and that it led under the outer wall, it did, anyway.
He'd had the key under the rock in Buxton to worry about for years. Now
he had to worry that some eager-beaver new guard would look behind his
poster and expose the whole thing, or that he would get another cellmate, or
that he would, after all those years, suddenly be transferred. He had all
those things on his mind for the next seven years. All I can say is that he
must have been one of the coolest men who ever lived. I would have gone
completely nuts after a while, living with all that uncertainty. But Andy just
went on playing the game.
He had to carry the possibility of discovery for another eight years-the
probability of it, you might say, because no matter how carefully he stacked
the cards in his favour, as an inmate of a state prison, he just didn't have that
many to stack and the gods had been kind to him for a very long time;
some eighteen years.
The most ghastly irony I can think of would have been if he had been
offered a parole. Can you imagine it? Three days before the parolee is
actually released, he is transferred into the light security wing to undergo a
complete physical and a battery of vocational tests. While he's there, his old
cell is completely cleaned out. Instead of getting his parole, Andy would
have gotten a long turn downstairs in solitary, followed by some more time
upstairs but in a different cell.
If he broke into the shaft in 1967, how come he didn't escape until 1975?
I don't know for sure-but I can advance some pretty good guesses. First, he
would have become more careful than ever. He was too smart to just push
ahead at flank speed and try to get out in eight months, or even in eighteen.
He must have gone on widening the opening on the crawlspace a little at a
time. A hole as big as a teacup by the time he took his New Year's Eve
drink that year. A hole as big as a dinner-plate by the time he took his
birthday drink in 1968. As big as a serving-tray by the time the 1969
baseball season opened.
For a time I thought it should have gone much faster than it apparently
did-after he broke through, I mean. It seemed to me that, instead of having
to pulverize the crap and take it out of his cell in the cheater gadgets I have
described, he could simply let it drop down the shaft. The length of time he
took makes me believe that he didn't dare do that. He might have decided
that the noise would arouse someone's suspicions. Or, if he knew about the
sewer-pipe, as I believe he must have, he would have been afraid that a
falling chunk of concrete would break it before he was ready, screwing up
the cellblock sewage system and leading to an investigation. And an
investigation, needless to say, would lead to ruin.
Still and all, I'd guess that, by the time Nixon was sworn in for his second
term, the hole would have been wide enough for him to wriggle through
and probably sooner than that Andy was a small guy. Why didn't he go
then?
That's where my educated guesses run out, folks; from this point they
become progressively wilder. One possibility is that the crawlspace itself
was clogged with crap and he had to clear it out But that wouldn't account
for all the time. So what was it? I think that maybe Andy got scared.
I've told you as well as I can how it is to be an institutional man. At first
you can't stand those four walls, then you get so you can abide them, then
you get so you accept them and then, as your body and your mind and
your spirit adjust to life on an HO scale, you get to love them. You are told
when to eat, when you can write letters, when you can smoke. If you're at
work in the laundry or the plate-shop, you're assigned five minutes of each
hour when you can go to the bathroom. For thirty-five years, my time was
twenty-five minutes after the hour, and after thirty-five years, that's the only
time I ever felt the need to take a piss or have a crap: twenty-five minutes
past the hour. And if for some reason I couldn't go, the need would pass at
thirty after, and come back at twenty-five past the next hour.
I think Andy may have been wrestling with that tiger-that institutional
syndrome-and also with the bulking fears that all of it might have been for
nothing. How many nights must he have lain awake under his poster,
thinking about that sewer line, knowing that the one chance was all he'd
ever get? The blueprints might have told him how big the pipe's bore was,
but a blueprint couldn't tell him what it would be like inside that pipe-if he
would be able to breathe without choking, if the rats were big enough and
mean enough to fight instead of retreating and a blueprint couldn't've told
him what he'd find at the end of the pipe, when and if he got there. Here's a
joke even funnier than the parole would have been: Andy breaks into the
sewer line, crawls through five hundred yards of choking, shit-smelling
darkness, and comes up against a heavy-gauge mesh screen at the end of it
all. Ha, ha, very funny.
That would have been on his mind. And if the long shot actually came in
and he was able to get out, would he be able to get some civilian clothes
and get away from the vicinity of the prison undetected? Last of all,
suppose he got out of the pipe, got away from Shawshank before the alarm
was raised, got to Buxton, overturned the right rock and found nothing
beneath? Not necessarily something so dramatic as arriving at the right field
and discovering that a high-rise apartment building had been erected on the
spot, or that it had turned into a supermarket parking lot. It could have been
that some little kid who liked rocks noticed that piece of volcanic glass,
turned it over, saw the deposit-box key, and took both it and the rock back
to his room as souvenirs. Maybe a November hunter kicked the rock, left
the key exposed, and a squirrel or a crow with a liking for bright shiny
things had taken it away. Maybe there had been spring floods one year,
breaching the wall, washing the key away. Maybe anything.
So I think-wild guess or not-that Andy just froze in place for a while.
After all, you can't lose if you don't bet. What did he have to lose, you ask?
His library, for one thing. The poison peace of institutional life, for another.
Any future chance to grab his safe identity. But he finally did it, just as I
have told you. He tried and, my! Didn't he succeed in spectacular fashion?
You tell me!
But did he get away, you ask? What happened after? What happened
when he got to that meadow and turned over the rock always assuming the
rock was still there?
I can't describe that scene for you, because this institutional man is still in
this institution, and expects to be for years to come.
But I'll tell you this. Very late in the summer of 1975, on 15 September to
be exact, I got a postcard which had been mailed from the tiny town of
McNary, Texas. That town is on the American side of the border, directly
across from El Porvenir. The message side of the card was totally blank.
But I know. I know it in my heart as surely as I know that we're all going to
die someday.
McNary was where he crossed. McNary, Texas.
So that's my story, Jack. I never believed how long it would take to write
it all down, or how many pages it would take. I started writing just after I
got that postcard, and here I am finishing up on 14 January 1976. I've used
three pencils right down to knuckle-stubs, and a whole tablet of paper. I've
kept the pages carefully hidden not that many could read my. hen-tracks,
anyway.
It stirred up more memories than I ever would have believed. Writing
about yourself seems to be a lot like sticking a branch into clear river-water
and roiling up the muddy bottom.
Well, you weren't writing about yourself, I hear someone in the peanut-
gallery saying. You were writing about Andy Dufresne. You're nothing but
a minor character in your own story. But you know, that's just not so. It's all
about me, every damned word of it Andy was the part of me they could
never lock up, the part of me that will rejoice when the gates finally open
for me and I walk out in my cheap suit with my twenty dollars of mad-
money in my pocket That part of me will rejoice no matter how old and
broken and scared the rest of me is. I guess it's just that Andy had more of
that part than me, and used it better.
There are others here like me, others who remember Andy. We're glad
he's gone, but a little sad, too. Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's
all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let
them go, or when
you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the
part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place
rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and
empty for their departure.
That's the story and I'm glad I told it, even if it is a bit inconclusive and
even though some of the memories the pencil prodded up (like that branch
poking up the river-mud) made me feel a little sad and even older than I am.
Thank you for listening. And Andy: If you're really down there, as I believe
you are, look at the stars for me just after sunset, and touch the sand, and
wade in the water, and feel free.
I never expected to take up this narrative again, but here I am with the
dogeared, folded pages open on the desk in front of me. Here I am adding
another three or four pages, writing in a brand-new tablet. A tablet I bought
in a store- I just walked into a store on Portland's Congress Street and
bought it.
I thought I had put finish to my story in a Shawshank prison cell on a
bleak January day in 1976. Now it's late June of 1977 and I am sitting in a
small, cheap room of the Brewster Hotel in Portland, adding to it The
window is open, and the sound of the traffic floating in seems huge,
exciting, and intimidating. I have to look constantly over at the window and
reassure myself that there are no bars on it I sleep poorly at night because
the bed in this room, as cheap as the room is, seems much too big and
luxurious. I snap awake every morning promptly at six-thirty, feeling
disorientated and frightened. My dreams are bad. I have a crazy feeling of
free fall. The sensation is as terrifying as it is exhilarating.
What has happened in my life? Can't you guess? I was paroled. After
thirty-eight years of routine hearings and routine details (in the course of
those thirty-eight years, three lawyers died on me), my parole was granted. I
suppose they decided that, at the age of fifty-eight, I was finally used up
enough to be deemed safe.
I came very close to burning the document you have just read. They
search outgoing parolees just as carefully as they search incoming 'new
fish'. And beyond containing enough dynamite to assure me of a quick
turnaround and another six or eight years inside, my 'memoirs' contained
something else: the name of the town where I believe Andy Dufresne to be.
Mexican police gladly cooperate with the American police, and I didn't
want my freedom-or my unwillingness to give up the story I'd worked so
long and hard to write-to cost Andy his.
Then I remembered how Andy had brought in his five hundred dollars
back in 1948, and I took out my story of him the same way. Just to be on
the safe side, I carefully rewrote each page which mentioned Zihuatanejo. If
the papers had been found during my 'outside search', as they call it at the
Shank, I would have gone back in on turnaround but the cops would have
been looking for Andy in a Peruvian seacoast town named Las Intrudres.
The Parole Committee got me a job as a 'stock-room assistant' at the big
FoodWay Market at the Spruce Mall in South Portland-which means I
became just one more ageing bag-boy. There's only two kinds of bag-boys,
you know; the old ones and the young ones. No one ever looks at either
kind. If you shop at the Spruce Mall FoodWay, I may have even taken your
groceries out to your car but you'd have had to have shopped there
between March and April of 1977, because that's as long as I worked there.
At first I didn't think I was going to be able to make it on the outside at all.
I've described prison society as a scaled-down model of your outside world,
but I had no idea of how fast things moved on the outside; the raw speed
people move at. They even talk faster. And louder.
It was the toughest adjustment I've ever had to make, and I haven't
finished making it yet not by a long way. Women, for instance. After
hardly knowing that
they were half of the human race for forty years, I was suddenly working
in a store filled with them. Old women, pregnant women wearing T-shirts
with arrows pointing downward and the printed motto reading BABY
HERE, skinny women with their nipples poking out of their shirts- a
woman wearing something like that when I went in would have gotten
arrested and then had a sanity hearing-women of every shape and size. I
found myself going around with a semi-hard almost all the time and cursing
myself for being a dirty old man. Going to the bathroom, that was another
thing. When I had to go (and the urge always came on me at twenty-five
past the hour), I had to fight the almost overwhelming need to check it with
my boss. Knowing that was something I could just go and do in this too-
bright outside world was one thing; adjusting my inner self to that
knowledge after all those years of checking it with the nearest screwhead or
facing two days in solitary for the oversight that was something else.
My boss didn't like me. He was a young guy, twenty-six or -seven, and I
could see that I sort of disgusted him, the way a cringing, servile old dog
that crawls up to you on its belly to be petted will disgust a man. Christ, I
disgusted myself. But I couldn't make myself stop. I wanted to tell him,
That's what a whole life in prison does for you, young man. It turns
everyone in a position of authority into a master, and you into every
master's dog. Maybe you know you've become a dog, even in prison, but
since everyone else in grey is a dog, too, it doesn't seem to matter so much.
Outside, it does. But I couldn't tell a young guy like him. He would never
understand. Neither would my P. O., a big, bluff ex-Navy man with a huge
red beard and a large stock of Polish jokes. He saw me for about five
minutes every week. 'Are you staying out of the bars, Red?' he'd ask when
he'd run out of Polish jokes. I'd say yeah, and that would be the end of it
until next week.
Music on the radio. When I went in, the big bands were just getting up a
good head of steam. Now every song sounds like it's about fucking. So
many cars. At first I felt like I was taking my life into my hands every time
I crossed the street. There was more-everything was strange and frightening
-but maybe you get the idea, or can at least grasp a corner of it I began to
think about doing something to get back in. When you're on parole, almost
anything will serve. I'm ashamed to say it, but I began to think about
stealing some money or shoplifting stuff from the FoodWay, anything, to
get back in where it was quiet and you knew everything that was going to
come up in the course of the day.
If I had never known Andy, I probably would have done that. But I kept
thinking of him, spending all those years chipping patiently away at the
cement with his rock-hammer so he could be free. I thought of that and it
made me ashamed and I'd drop the idea again. Oh, you can say he had more
reason to be free than I did-he had a new identity and a lot of money. But
that's not really true, you know. Because he didn't know for sure that the
new identity was still there, and without the new identity, the money would
always be out of reach. No, what he needed was just to be free, and if I
kicked away what I had, it would be like spitting in the face of everything
he had worked so hard to win back. So what I started to do on my time off
was to hitchhike a ride down to the little town of Buxton. This was in the
early April of 1977, the snow just starting to melt off the fields, the air just
beginning to be warm, the baseball teams coming north to start a new
season playing the only game I'm sure God approves of. When I went on
these trips, I carried a Silva compass in my pocket.
There's a big hayfield in Buxton, Andy had said, and at the north end of
that hayfield there's a rock wall, right out of a Robert Frost poem. And
somewhere along the base of that wall is a rock that has no earthly business
in a Maine hayfield. A
fool's errand, you say. How many hayfields are there in a small rural
town like Buxton? Fifty? A hundred? Speaking from personal experience,
I'd put it at even higher than that, if you add in the fields now cultivated
which might have been haygrass when Andy went in. And if I did find the
right one, I might never know it Because I might overlook that black piece
of volcanic glass, or, much more likely, Andy put it into his pocket and took
it with him. So I'd agree with you. A fool's errand, no doubt about it. Worse,
a dangerous one for a man on parole, because some of those fields were
clearly marked with NO TRESPASSING signs. And, as I've said, they're
more than happy to slam your ass back inside if you get out of line. A fool's
errand but so is chipping at a blank concrete wall for twenty-eight years.
And when you're no longer the man who can get it for you and just an old
bag-boy, it's nice to have a hobby to take your mind off your new life. My
hobby was looking for Andy's rock.
So I'd hitchhike to Buxton and walk the roads. I'd listen to the birds, to
the spring runoff in the culverts, examine the bottles the retreating snows
had revealed-all useless non-returnables, I am sorry to say; the world seems
to have gotten awfully spendthrift since I went into the slam-and looking
for hayfields.
Most of them could be eliminated right off. No rock walls. Others had
rock walls, but my compass told me they were facing the wrong direction. I
walked these wrong ones anyway. It was a comfortable thing to be doing,
and on those outings I really felt free, at peace. An old dog walked with me
one Saturday. And one day I saw a winter-skinny deer.
Then came 23 April, a day I'll not forget even if I live another fifty-eight
years. It was a balmy Saturday afternoon, and I was walking up what a little
boy fishing from a bridge told me was called The Old Smith Road. I had
taken a lunch in a brown FoodWay bag, and had eaten it sitting on a rock by
the road. When I was done I carefully buried my leavings, as my dad had
taught me before he died, when I was a sprat no older than the fisherman
who had named the road for me.
Around two o'clock I came to a big field on my left. There was a stone
wall at the far end of it, running roughly northwest I walked back to it,
squelching over the wet ground, and began to walk the wall. A squirrel
scolded me from an oak tree. Three-quarters of the way to the end, I saw the
rock. No mistake. Black glass and as smooth as silk. A rock with no earthly
business in a Maine hayfield. For a long time I just looked at it, feeling that
I might cry, for whatever reason. The squirrel had followed me, and it was
still chattering away. My heart was beating madly.
When I felt I had myself under control, I went to the rock, squatted
beside it-the joints in my knees went off like a double-barrelled shotgun-
and let my hand touch it. It was real. I didn't pick it up because I thought
there would be anything under it; I could just as easily have walked away
without finding what was beneath. I certainly had no plans to take it away
with me, because I didn't feel it was mine to take- I had a feeling that taking
that rock from the field would have been the worst kind of theft. No, I only
picked it up to feel it better, to get the heft of the thing, and, I suppose, to
prove its reality by feeling its satiny texture against my skin.
I had to look at what was underneath for a long time. My eyes saw it, but
it took a while for my mind to catch up. It was an envelope, carefully
wrapped in a plastic bag to keep away the damp. My name was written
across the front in Andy's clear script. I took the envelope and left the rock
where Andy had left it, and Andy's friend before him.
Dear Red,
If you're reading this, then you're out. One way or another, you're out.
And If you've followed along this far, you might be willing to come a little
further. I think you remember the name of the town, don't you? I could use a
good man to help me get my project on wheels.
Meantime, have a drink on me-and do think it over. I will be keeping an
eye out for you.
Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and
no good thing ever dies. I will be hoping that this letter finds you, and finds
you well.
Your friend, Peter Stevens
I didn't read that letter in the field. A kind of terror had come over me, a
need to get away from there before I was seen. To make what may be an
appropriate pun, I was in terror of being apprehended.
I went back to my room and read it there, with the smell of old men's
dinners drifting up the stairwell to me-Beefaroni, Ricearoni, Noodleroni.
You can bet that whatever the old folks of America, the ones on fixed
incomes, are eating tonight, it almost certainly ends in roni.
I opened the envelope and read the letter and then I put my head in my
arms and cried.
With the letter there were twenty new fifty-dollar bills.
And here I am in the Brewster Hotel, technically a fugitive from justice
again-parole violation is my crime. No one's going to throw up any
roadblocks to catch a criminal wanted on that charge, I guess-wondering
what I should do now.
I have this manuscript I have a small piece of luggage about the size of a
doctor's bag that holds everything I own. I have nineteen fifties, four tens, a
five, three ones, and assorted change. I broke one of the fifties to buy this
tablet of paper and a deck of smokes.
Wondering what I should do.
But there's really no question. It always comes down to just two choices.
Get busy living or get busy dying.
First I'm going to put this manuscript back in my bag. Then I'm going to
buckle it up, grab my coat, go downstairs, and check out of this fleabag.
Then I'm going to walk uptown to a bar and put that five dollar bill down in
front of the bartender and ask him to bring me two straight shots of Jack
Daniels-one for me and one for Andy Dufresne.
Other than a beer or two, they'll be the first drinks I've taken as a free
man since 1938.
Then I am going to tip the bartender a dollar and thank him kindly. I will
leave the bar and walk up Spring Street to the Greyhound terminal there and
buy a bus ticket to El Paso by way of New York City. When I get to El
Paso, I'm going to buy a ticket to McNary. And when I get to McNary, I
guess I'll have a chance to find out if an old crook like me can find a way to
float across the border and into Mexico.
Sure I remember the name. Zihuatanejo. A name like that is just too
pretty to forget I find I am excited, so excited I can hardly hold the pencil in
my trembling hand. I think it is the excitement that only a free man can feel,
a free man starting a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain.
I hope Andy is down there.
I hope I can make it across the border.
I hope to see my friend and shake his hand.
I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.
APT PUPIL
1
He looked like the total all-American kid as he pedalled his twenty-six-
inch Schwinn with the ape-hanger handlebars up the residential suburban
street, and that's just what he was: Todd Bowden, thirteen years old, five-
feet-eight and a healthy one hundred and forty pounds, hair the colour of
ripe corn, blue eyes, white even teeth, lightly tanned skin marred by not
even the first shadow of adolescent acne.
He was smiling a summer vacation smile as he pedalled through the sun
and shade three blocks from his own house. He looked like the kind of kid
who might have a paper route, and as a matter of fact, he did-he delivered
the Santa Donato Clarion. He also looked like the kind of kid who might
sell greeting cards for premiums, and he had done that, too. They were the
kind that come with your name printed inside-JACK AND MARY BURKE,
or DON AND SALLY, or THE MURCHISONS. He looked like the sort of
boy who might whistle while he worked, and he often did so. He whistled
quite prettily, in fact. His dad was an architectural engineer who made
$40,000 a year. His mom was a housewife and a secretarial school graduate
(she had met Todd's father one day when he needed a secretary from the
pool) who typed manuscripts in her spare time. She had kept all of Todd's
old school report cards in a folder. Her favourite was his final fourth-grade
card, on which Mrs Upshaw had scratched: 'Todd is an extremely apt pupil.'
He was, too. Straight As and Bs all the way up the line. If he'd done any
better-straight As, for example-his friends might have begun to think he was
weird.
Now he brought his bike to a halt in front of 963 Claremont Street and
stepped off it. The house was a small bungalow set discreetly back on its
lot. It was white with green shutters and green trim. A hedge ran around the
front The hedge was well-watered and well-clipped.
Todd brushed his blond hair out of his eyes and walked the Schwinn up
the cement path to the steps. He was still smiling, and his smile was open
and expectant and beautiful, a marvel of modern dentistry and fluoridated
water. He pushed down the bike's kickstand with the toe of one Nike
running-shoe and then picked the folded newspaper off the bottom step. It
wasn't the Clarion; it was the LA Times. He put it under his arm and
mounted the steps. At the top was a heavy wooden door with no window
inside of a latched screen door. There was a doorbell on the right-hand
doorframe, and below the bell were two small signs, each neatly screwed
into the wood and covered with protective plastic so they wouldn't yellow
or waterspot. German efficiency, Todd thought, and his smile widened a
little. It was an adult thought, and he always mentally congratulated himself
when he had one of those. The top sign said ARTHUR DENKER.
The bottom one said NO SOLICITORS, NO PEDDLERS, NO
SALESMEN. Smiling still, Todd rang the bell.
He could barely hear its muted burring, somewhere far off inside the
small house. He took his finger off the bell and cocked his head a little,
listening for footsteps. There were none. He looked at his Timex watch (one
of the premiums he had gotten for selling personalized greeting cards) and
saw that it was twelve past ten. The guy should be up by now. Todd himself
was always up by seven-thirty at the latest, even during summer vacation.
The early bird catches the worm. He listened for another thirty seconds and
when the house remained silent he leaned on the bell,
watching the sweep second hand on his Timex as he did so. He had been
pressing the doorbell for exactly seventy-one seconds when he finally heard
shuffling footsteps. Slippers, he deduced from the soft wish-wish sound.
Todd was into deductions. His current ambition was to become a private
detective when he grew up. 'All right! All right!' the man who was
pretending to be Arthur Denker called querulously. 'I'm coming! Let it go!
I'm coming!'
Todd stopped pushing the doorbell button. He looked at the tip of his
forefinger. There was a small red circle there.
A chain and bolt rattled on the far side of the windowless inner door.
Then it was pulled open.
An old man, hunched inside a bathrobe, stood looking out through the
screen. A cigarette smouldered between his fingers. Todd thought the man
looked like a cross between Albert Einstein and Boris Karloff. His hair was
long and white but beginning to yellow in an unpleasant way that was '
more nicotine than ivory. His face was wrinkled and pouched and puffy
with sleep, and Todd saw with some distaste that he hadn't bothered shaving
for the last couple of days. Todd's father was fond of saying, 'A shave puts a
shine on the morning.' Todd's father shaved every day, whether he had to
work or not. The eyes looking out at Todd were watchful but deeply
sunken, laced with snaps of red. Todd felt an instant of deep
disappointment. The guy did look a little bit like Albert Einstein, and he did
look a little bit like Boris Karloff, but what he looked like more than
anything else was one of the seedy old winos that hung around down by the
railroad yard. But of course, Todd reminded himself, the man had just
gotten up. Todd had seen Denker many times before today (although he had
been very careful to make sure that Denker hadn't seen him, no way, Jose),
and on his public occasions, Denker looked very natty, every inch an officer
in retirement, you might say, even though he was seventy-six if the articles
Todd had read at the library had his birth-date right. On the days when Todd
had shadowed him to the Shoprite where Denker did his shopping or to one
of the three movie theatres on the bus line-Denker had no car-he was
always dressed in one of four neatly kept suits, no matter how warm the
weather. If the weather looked threatening he carried a furled umbrella
under one arm like a swagger stick. He sometimes wore a trilby hat. And on
the occasions when Denker went out, he was always neatly shaved and his
white moustache (worn to conceal an imperfectly corrected harelip) was
carefully trimmed.
'A boy,' he said now. His voice was thick and sleepy. Todd saw with new
disappointment that his robe was faded and tacky. One rounded collar point
stood up at a drunken angle to poke at his wattled neck. There was a splotch
of something that might have been chili or possibly A-l Steak Sauce on the
left lapel, and he smelled of cigarettes and stale booze. 'A boy,' he repeated.
'I don't need anything, boy. Read the sign. You can read, can't you? Of
course you can. All American boys can read. Don't be a nuisance, boy.
Good day.' The door began to close.
He might have dropped it right there, Todd thought much later on one of
the nights when sleep was hard to find. His disappointment at seeing the
man for the first time at close range, seeing him with his street-face put
away-hanging in the closet, you might say, along with his umbrella and his
trilby-might have done it. It could have ended in that moment, the tiny,
unimportant snicking sound of the latch cutting off everything that
happened later as neatly as a pair of shears. But, as the man himself had
observed, he was an American boy, and he had been taught that persistence
is a virtue. 'Don't forget your paper, Mr Dussander,' Todd said, holding the
Times out politely. The door stopped dead in its swing still inches from the
jamb. A tight and watchful expression flitted across Kurt Dussander's face
and was gone at
once. There might have been fear in that expression. It was good, the way
he had made that expression disappear, but Todd was disappointed for the
third time. He hadn't expected Dussander to be good; he had expected
Dussander to be great. Boy, Todd thought with real disgust Boy oh boy.
He pulled the door open again. One hand, bunched with arthritis,
unlatched the screen door. The hand pushed the screen door open just
enough to wriggle through like a spider and close over the edge of the paper
Todd was holding out. The boy saw with distaste that the old man's
fingernails were long and yellow and horny. It was a hand that had spent
most of its waking hours holding one cigarette after another. Todd thought
smoking was a filthy dangerous habit, one he himself would never take up.
It really was a wonder that Dussander had lived as long as he had. The old
man tugged. 'Give me my paper.'
'Sure thing, Mr Dussander.' Todd released his hold on the paper. The
spider-hand yanked it inside. The screen closed.
'My name is Denker,' the old man said. 'Not this Doo-Zander. Apparently
you cannot read. What a pity. Good day.'
The door started to close again. Todd spoke rapidly into ' the narrowing
gap. 'Bergen-Belsen, January 1943 to June 1943, Auschwitz, June 1943 to
June of 1944, Unterkommandant. Patin -'
The door stopped again. The old man's pouched and pallid face hung in
the gap like a wrinkled, half-deflated balloon. Todd smiled.
'You left Patin just ahead of the Russians. You got to Buenos Aires. Some
people say you got rich there, investing the gold you took out of Germany
in the drug trade. Whatever, you were in Mexico City from 1950 to 1952.
Then -'
'Boy, you are crazy like a cuckoo bird.' One of the arthritic fingers twirled
circles around a misshapen ear. But the toothless mouth was quivering in an
infirm, panicky way 'From 1952 until 1958, I don't know,' Todd said,
smiling more widely still. 'No one does, I guess, or at least they're not
telling. But an Israeli agent spotted you in Cuba, working as the concierge
in a big hotel just before Castro took over. They lost you when the rebels
came into Havana. You popped up in West Berlin in 1965. They almost got
you.' He pronounced the last two words as one: gotcha. At the same time he
squeezed all of his fingers together into one large, wriggling fist.
Dussander's eyes dropped to those well-made and well-nourished American
hands, hands that were made for building soapbox racers and Aurora
models. Todd had done both. In fact, the year before, he and his dad had
built a model of the Titanic. It had taken almost four months, and Todd's
father kept it in his office.
'I don't know what you are talking about,' Dussander said.
Without his false teeth, his words had a mushy sound Todd didn't like. It
didn't sound well, authentic. Colonel Klink on Hogan's Heroes sounded
more like a Nazi than Dussander did. But in his time he must have been a
real whiz. In an article on the death-camps in Men's Action, the writer had
called him The Blood-Fiend of Patin. 'Get out of here, boy. Before I call the
police.'
'Gee, I guess you better call them, Mr Dussander. Or Heir Dussander, if
you like that better.' He continued to smile, showing perfect teeth that had
been fluoridated since the beginning of his life and bathed thrice a day in
Crest toothpaste for almost as long. 'After 1965, no one saw you again
until I did, two months ago, on the downtown bus.'
'You're insane.'
'So if you want to call the police,' Todd said, smiling, 'you go right ahead.
I'll wait on the stoop. But if you don't want to call them right away, why
don't I come in?
We'll talk.' There was a long moment while the old man looked at the
smiling boy. Birds twitted in the trees. On the next block a power mower
was running, and far off, on busier streets, horns honked out their own
rhythm of life and commerce.
In spite of everything, Todd felt the onset of doubt He couldn't be wrong,
could he? Was there some mistake on his part? He didn't think so, but this
was no schoolroom exercise. It was real life. So he felt a surge of relief
(mild relief, he assured himself later) when Dussander said: 'You may come
in for a moment, if you like. But only because I do not wish to make trouble
for you, you understand?'
'Sure, Mr Dussander,' Todd said. He opened the screen and came into the
hall. Dussander closed the door behind them, shutting off the morning.
The house smelted stale and slightly malty. It smelted the way Todd's
own house smelted sometimes the morning after his folks had thrown a
party and before his mother had had a chance to air it out. But this smell
was worse. It was lived-in and ground-in. It was liquor, fried food, sweat,
old clothes, and some stinky medicinal smell like Vicks or Mentholatum. It
was dark in the hallway, and Dussander was standing too close, his head
hunched into the collar of his robe like the head of a vulture waiting for
some hurt animal to give up the ghost. In that instant, despite the stubble
and the loosely hanging flesh, Todd could see the man who had stood inside
the black SS uniform more clearly than he had ever seen him on the street.
And he felt a sudden lancet of fear slide into his belly. Mild fear, he
amended later.
'I should tell you "that if anything happens to me -' he began, and then
Dussander shuffled past him and into the living room, his slippers wish-
wishing on the floor. He flapped a contemptuous hand at Todd, and Todd
felt a flush of hot blood mount into his throat and cheeks.
Todd followed him, his smile wavering for the first time. He had not
pictured it happening quite like this. But it would work out. Things would
come into focus. Of course they would. Things always did. He began to
smile again as he stepped into the living room.
It was another disappointment-and how!-but one he supposed he should
have been prepared for. There was of course no oil portrait of Hitler with
his forelock dangling and eyes that followed you. No medals in cases, no
ceremonial sword mounted on the wall, no Luger or PPK Walther on the
mantle (there was, in fact, no mantle). Of course, Todd told himself, the guy
would have to be crazy to put any of those things out where people could
see them. Still, it was hard to put everything you saw in the movies or on
TV out of your head. It looked like the living room of any old man living
alone on a slightly frayed pension. The fake fireplace was faced with fake
bricks. A Westclox hung over it. There was a black and white Motorola TV
on a stand; the tips of the rabbit ears had been wrapped in aluminium foil to
improve reception. The floor was covered with a grey rug; its nap was
balding. The magazine rack by the sofa held copies of National Geographic,
Reader's Digest, and the LA Times. Instead of Hitler or a ceremonial sword
hung on the wall, there was a framed certificate of citizenship and a picture
of a woman in a funny hat. Dussander later told him that sort of hat was
called a cloche, and they had been popular in the twenties and thirties.
'My wife,' Dussander said sentimentally. 'She died in 1955 of a lung
disease. At that time I was a draughtsman at the Menschler Motor Works in
Essen. I was heartbroken.'
Todd continued to smile. He crossed the room as if to get a better look at
the woman in the picture. Instead of looking at the picture, he fingered the
shade on a small table-lamp.
'Stop that!' Dussander barked harshly. Todd jumped back a little.
That was good,' he said sincerely. 'Really commanding. It was Use Koch
who had the lampshades made out of human skin, wasn't it? And she was
the one who had the trick with the little glass tubes.'
'I don't know what you're talking about,' Dussander said. There was a
package of Kools, the kind with no filter, on top of the TV. He offered them
to Todd. 'Cigarette?' he asked, and grinned. His grin was hideous.
'No. They give you lung cancer. My dad used to smoke, but he gave it up.
He went to SmokeEnders.'
'Did he?' Dussander produced a wooden match from the pocket of his
robe and scratched it indifferently on the plastic case of the Motorola.
Puffing, he said: 'Can you give me one reason why I shouldn't call the
police and tell them of the monstrous accusations you've just made? One
reason? Speak quickly, boy. The telephone is just down the hall. Your father
would spank you, I think. You would sit for dinner on a cushion for a week
or so, eh?'
'My parents don't believe in spanking. Corporal punishment causes more
problems than it cures.' Todd's eyes suddenly gleamed. 'Did you spank any
of them? The women? Did you take off their clothes and -'
With a muffled exclamation, Dussander started for the phone.
Todd said coldly: 'You better not do that.'
Dussander turned. In measured tones that were spoiled only slightly by
the fact that his false teeth were not in, he said: 'I tell you this once, boy,
and once only. My name is Arthur Denker. It has never been anything else;
it has not even been Americanized. I was in fact named Arthur by my
father, who greatly admired the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, It has never
been Doo-Zander, nor Himmler, nor Father Christmas. I was a reserve
lieutenant in the war. I never joined the Nazi party. In the battle of Berlin I
fought for three years. I will admit that in the late thirties, when I was first
married, I supported Hitler. He ended the depression and returned some of
the pride we had lost in the aftermath of the sickening and unfair Treaty of
Versailles. I suppose I supported him mostly because I got a job and there
was tobacco again, and I didn't need to hunt through the gutters when I
needed to smoke. I thought, in the late thirties, that he was a great man.
In his own way, perhaps he was. But at the end he was mad, directing
phantom armies at the whim of an astrologer. He even gave Blondi, his dog,
a death-capsule. The act of a madman; by the end they were all madmen,
singing the Horst Wessel Song as they fed poison to their children. On 2
May 1945, my regiment gave up to the Americans. I remember that a
private soldier named Hackermeyer gave me a chocolate bar. I wept.
There was no reason to fight on; the war was over, and really had been
since February. I was interned at Essen and was treated very well. We
listened to the Nuremberg trials on the radio and when Goering committed
suicide, I traded fourteen American cigarettes for half a bottle of schnapps
and got drunk. I was released in January of 1946. At the Essen Motor
Works I put wheels on cars until 1963, when I retired and emigrated to the
United States. To come here was a lifelong ambition. In 1967 I became a
citizen. I am an American. I vote. No Buenos Aires. No drug dealing. No
Berlin. No Cuba.' He pronounced it Koo-ba. 'And now, unless you leave, I
make my telephone call.'
He watched Todd do nothing. Then he went down the hall and picked up
the telephone.
Still Todd stood in the living room, beside the table with the small lamp
on it.
Dussander began to dial. Todd watched him, his heart speeding up until it
was drumming in his chest. After the fourth number, Dussander turned and
looked at him. His shoulders sagged. He put the phone down.
'A boy,' he breathed. 'A boy.' Todd smiled widely but rather modestly.
'How did you find out?'
'One piece of luck and a lot of hard work,' Todd said' There's this friend
of mine, Harold Pegler his name is, only all the kids call him Foxy. He
plays second base for our team.
And his dad's got all these magazines out in his garage. Great big stacks
of them. War magazines. They're old. I looked for some new ones, but the
guy who runs the newsstand across from the school says most of them went
out of business. In most of them there's pictures of Krauts-German soldiers,
I mean-and Japs torturing these women. And articles about the
concentration camps. I really groove on all that concentration camp stuff.'
'You groove on it.' Dussander was staring at him, one hand rubbing up
and down on his cheek, producing a very small sandpapery sound.
'Groove. You know. I get off on it. I'm interested.'
He remembered that day in Foxy's garage as clearly as anything in his
life-more clearly, he suspected. He remembered in the fourth grade, before
Careers Day, how Mrs Anderson (all the kids called her Bugs because of
her big front teeth) had talked to them about what she called finding YOUR
GREAT INTEREST.
'It comes all at once,' Bugs Anderson had rhapsodized. 'You see
something for the first time, and right away you know you have found
YOUR GREAT INTEREST. It's like a key turning in a lock. Or falling in
love for the first time. That's why Careers Day is so important, children-it
may be the day on which you find YOUR GREAT INTEREST.'
And she had gone on to tell them about her own GREAT INTEREST,
which turned out not to be teaching the fourth grade but collecting
nineteenth-century postcards.
Todd had thought Mrs Anderson was full of bullspit at the time, but that
day in Foxy's garage, he remembered what she had said and wondered if
maybe she hadn't been right after all.
The Santa Anas had been blowing that day, and to the east there were
brush-fires. He remembered the smell of burning, hot and greasy. He
remembered Foxy's crewcut, and the flakes of Butch Wax clinging to the
front of it. He remembered everything.
'I know there's comics here someplace,' Foxy had said. His mother had a
hangover and had kicked them out of the house for making too much noise.
'Neat ones. They're Westerns, mostly, but there's some Turok, Son of Stones
and_'
'What are those?' Todd asked, pointing at the bulging cardboard cartons
under the stairs.
'Ah, they're no good,' Foxy said. 'True war stories, mostly. Boring.'
'Can I look at some?'
'Sure. I'll find the comics.'
But by the time fat Foxy Pegler found them, Todd no longer wanted to
read comics. He was lost. Utterly lost.
It's like a key turning in a lock. Or falling in love for the first time.
It had been like that. He had known about the war, of course-not the
stupid one going on now, where the Americans had gotten the shit kicked
out of them by a bunch of gooks in black pyjamas-but World War II. He
knew that the Americans
wore round helmets with net on them and the Krauts wore sort of square
ones. He knew that the Americans won most of the battles and that the
Germans had invented rockets near the end and shot them from Germany
onto London. He had even known something about the concentration
camps.
The difference between all of that and what he found in the magazines
under the stairs in Foxy's garage was like the difference between being told
about germs and then actually seeing them in a microscope, squirming
around and alive.
Here was Use Koch. Here were crematoriums with their doors standing
open on their soot-clotted hinges. Here were officers in SS uniforms and
prisoners in striped uniforms.
The smell of the old pulp magazines was like the smell of the brush-fires
burning out of control on the east of Santo Donate, and he could feel the old
paper crumbling against the pads of his fingers, and he turned the pages, no
longer in Foxy's garage but caught somewhere crosswise in time, trying to
cope with the idea that they had really done those things, that somebody
had really done those things, and that somebody had let them do those
things, and his head began to ache with a mixture of revulsion and
excitement, and his eyes were hot and strained, but he read on, and from a
column of print beneath a picture of tangled bodies at a place called
Dachau, this figure jumped out at him: 6,000,000. And he thought:
Somebody goofed there, somebody added a zero or two, that's three times
as many people as there are in LA! But then, in another magazine (the cover
of this one showed a woman chained to a wall while a guy in a Nazi
uniform approached her with a poker in his hand and a grin on his face), he
saw it again: 6,000,000 His headache got worse. His mouth went dry.
Dimly, from some distance, he heard Foxy saying he had to go in for
supper. Todd asked Foxy if he could stay out here in the garage and read
while Foxy ate. Foxy gave him a look of mild puzzlement, shrugged, and
said sure. And Todd read, hunched over the boxes of the old true war
magazines, until his mother called and asked if he was ever going to go
home.
Like a key turning in a lock.
All the magazines said it was bad, what had happened. But all the stories
were continued at the back of the book, and when you turned to those
pages, the words saying it was bad were surrounded by ads, and these ads
sold German knives and belts and helmets as well as Magic Trusses and
Guaranteed Hair Restorer. These ads sold German flags emblazoned with
swastikas and Nazi Lugers and a game called Panzer Attack as well as
correspondence lessons and offers to make you rich selling elevator shoes
to short men.
They said it was bad, but it seemed like a lot of people must not mind.
Like falling in love.
Oh yes, he remembered that day very well. He remembered everything
about it- a yellowing pin-up calendar for a defunct year on the back wall,
the oil-stain on the cement floor, the way the magazines had been tied
together with orange twine. He remembered how his headache had gotten a
little worse each time he thought of that incredible number, 6,000,000 He
remembered thinking: I want to know about everything that happened in
those places.
Everything. And I want to know which is more true-the words, or the ads
they put beside the words.
He remembered Bugs Anderson as he at last pushed the boxes back
under the stairs and thought: She was right. I've found my GREAT
INTEREST.
Dussander looked at Todd for a long time. Then he crossed the living
room and sat down heavily in a rocking chair. He looked at Todd again,
unable to analyze the slightly dreamy, slightly nostalgic expression on the
boy's face.
'Yeah. It was the magazines that got me interested, but I figured a lot of
what they said was just, you know, bullspit. So I went to the library and
found out a lot more stuff. Some of it was even neater. At first the crummy
librarian didn't want me to look at any of it because it was in the adult
section of the library, but I told her it was for school. If it's for school they
have to let you have it. She called my dad, though.' Todd's eyes turned up
scornfully. 'Like she thought dad didn't know what I was doing, if you can
dig that.'
'He did know?'
'Sure. My dad thinks kids should find out about life as soon as they can-
the bad as well as the good. Then they'll be ready for it. He says life is a
tiger you have to grab by the tail, and if you don't know the nature of the
beast it will eat you up.'
'Mmmmm,' Dussander said.
'My mom thinks the same way.'
'Mmmmm.' Dussander looked dazed, not quite sure where he was.
'Anyhow,' Todd said, 'the library stuff was real good.
They must have had a hundred books with stuff in them about the Nazi
concentration camps, just here in the Santa Donate library. A lot of people
must like to read about that stuff. There weren't as many pictures as in
Foxy's dad's magazines, but the other stuff was real gooshy. Chairs with
spikes sticking up through the seats. Pulling out gold teeth with pliers.
Poison gas that came out of the showers.' Todd shook his head. 'You guys
just went overboard, you know that? You really did.'
'Gooshy,' Dussander said heavily.
'I really did do a research paper, and you know what I got on it? An A
Plus. Of course I had to be careful. You have to write that stuff in a certain
way. You got to be careful.'
'Do you?' Dussander asked. He took another cigarette with a hand that
trembled.
'Oh yeah. All those library books, they read a certain way. Like the guys
who wrote them got puking sick over what they were writing about' Todd
was frowning, wrestling with the thought, trying to bring it out The fact that
tone, as that word is applied to writing, wasn't yet in his vocabulary, made it
more difficult 'They all write like they lost a lot of sleep over it How we've
got to be careful so nothing like that ever happens again. I made my paper
like that, and I guess the teacher gave me an A just 'cause I read the source
material without losing my lunch.' Once more, Todd smiled winningly.
Dussander dragged heavily on his unfiltered Kool. The tip trembled
slightly. As he feathered smoke out of his nostrils, he coughed an old man's
dank, hollow cough. 'I can hardly believe this conversation is taking place,'
he said. He leaned forward and peered closely at Todd. 'Boy, do you know
the word "existentialism"?'
Todd ignored the question. 'Did you ever meet Use Koch?'
'Use Koch?' Almost inaudibly, Dussander said: 'Yes. I met her.'
'Was she beautiful?' Todd asked eagerly. 'I mean' His hands described
an hourglass in the air.
'Surely you have seen her photograph?' Dussander asked. 'An aficionado
such as yourself?'
'What's an af aff'
'An aficionado,' Dussander said, 'is one who grooves. One who gets off
on something.'
'Yeah? Cool.' Todd's grin, puzzled and weak for a moment, shone out
triumphantly again.
'Sure, I've seen her picture. But you know how they are in those books.'
He spoke as if Dussander had them all. 'Black and white, fuzzy just
snapshots. None of those guys knew they were taking pictures for, you
know, history. Was she really stacked?'
'She was fat and dumpy and she had bad skin,' Dussander said shortly. He
crushed his cigarette out half-smoked in a Table Talk pie dish filled with
dead butts.
'Oh. Golly.' Todd's face fell.
'Just luck,' Dussander mused, looking at Todd. 'You saw my picture in a
war-adventures magazine and happened to ride next to me on the bus.
Tcha!' He brought a fist down on the arm of his easy chair, but without
much force.
'No sir, Mr Dussander. There was more to it than that. A lot.' Todd added
earnestly, leaning forward.
'Oh? Really?' The bushy eyebrows rose, signalling polite disbelief.
'Sure. I mean, the pictures of you in my scrapbook were all thirty years
old, at least. I mean, it is 1974.'
'You keep a a scrapbook?'
'Oh, yes, sir! It's a good one. Hundreds of pictures. I'll show it to you
sometime. You'll go ape.'
Dussander's face pulled into a revolted grimace, but he said nothing.
The first couple of times I saw you, I wasn't sure at all. And then you got
on the bus one day when it was raining, and you had this shiny black slicker
on -'
'That,' Dussander breathed.
'Sure. There was a picture of you in a coat like that in one of the
magazines out in Foxy's garage. Also, a photo of you in your SS greatcoat
in one of the library books. And when I saw you that day, I just said to
myself, "It's for sure. That's Kurt Dussander." So I started to shadow you -'
'You did what?'
'Shadow you. Follow you. My ambition is to be a private detective like
Sam Spade in the books, or Mannix on TV. Anyway, I was super careful. I
didn't want you to get wise.
Want to look at some pictures?'
Todd took a folded-over manilla envelope from his back pocket. Sweat
had stuck the flap down. He peeled it back carefully. His eyes were
sparkling like a boy thinking about his birthday, or Christmas, or the
firecrackers he will shoot off on the Fourth of July.
'You took pictures of me?"
'Oh, you bet I got this little camera. A Kodak. It's thin and flat and fits
right into your hand. Once you get the hang of it, you can take pictures of
the subject just by holding the camera in your hand and spreading your
fingers enough to let the lens peek through. Then you hit the button with
your thumb.' Todd laughed modestly. 'I got the hang of it but I took a lot of
pictures of my fingers while I did. I hung right in there, though. I think a
person can do anything if they try hard enough, you know it? It's corny but
true.'
Kurt Dussander had begun to look white and ill, shrunken inside his robe.
'Did you have these pictures finished by a commercial developer, boy?'
'Huh?' Todd looked shocked and startled, then contemptuous. 'No! What
do you think I am, stupid? My dad's got a darkroom. I've been developing
my own pictures since I was nine.'
Dussander said nothing, but he relaxed a little and some colour came
back into his face.
Todd handed him several glossy prints, the rough edges confirming that
they had been home-developed. Dussander went through them, silently
grim. Here he was sitting erect in a window-seat of the downtown bus, with
a copy of the latest James Michener, Centennial, in his hands. Here he was
at the Devon Avenue bus stop, his umbrella cocked under his arm and his
head cocked back at an angle which suggested De Gaulle at his most
imperial. Here he was standing on line just under the marquee of the
Majestic Theatre, erect and silent, conspicuous among the leaning teenagers
and blank-faced housewives in curlers by his height and his bearing.
Finally, here he was peering into his own mailbox.
'I was scared you might see me on that one,' Todd said. 'It was a
calculated risk. I was right across the street Boy oh boy, I wish I could
afford a Minolta with a telephoto lens.
Someday' Todd looked wistful.
'No doubt you had a story ready, just in case.'
'I was going to ask you if you'd seen my dog. Anyway, after I developed
the pix, I compared them to these.'
He handed Dussander three Xeroxed photographs. He had seen them all
before, many times. The first showed him in his office at the Eatin
resettlement camp; it had been cropped so nothing showed but him and the
Nazi flag on its stand by his desk. The second was a picture that had been
taken on the day of his enlistment The last showed him shaking hands with
Heinrich Clucks, who had been subordinate only to Himmler himself.
'I was pretty sure then, but I couldn't see if you had the harelip because of
your goshdamn moustache. But I had to be sure, so I got this.'
He handed over the last sheet from his envelope. It had been folded over
many times. Dirt was grimed into the creases. The corners were lopped and
milled-the way papers get when they spend a long time in the pockets of
young boys who have no shortage of things to do and places to go. It was a
copy of the Israeli want-sheet on Kurt Dussander.
Holding it in his hands, Dussander reflected on corpses that were unquiet
and refused to stay buried.
'I took your fingerprints,' Todd said, smiling. 'And then I did the
compares to the one on the sheet.'
Dussander gaped at him and then uttered the German word for shit 'You
did
not!'
'Sure I did. My mom and dad gave me a fingerprint set for Christmas last
year. A real one, not just a toy. It had the powder and three brushes for three
different surfaces and special paper for lifting them. My folks know I want
to be a PI when I grow up. Of course, they think I'll grow out of it' He
dismissed this idea with a disinterested lift and drop of his shoulders. 'The
book explained all about whorls and lands and points of similarity. They're
called compares. You need eight compares for a fingerprint to get accepted
in court 'So anyway, one day when you were at the movies, I came here and
dusted your mailbox and doorknob and lifted all the prints I could. Pretty
smart, huh?' Dussander said nothing. He was clutching the arms of his
chair, and his toothless, deflated mouth was trembling. Todd didn't like that.
It made him look like he was on the verge of tears. That, of course, was
ridiculous. The Blood Fiend of Patin in tears? You might as well expect
Chevrolet to go bankrupt or McDonald's to give up burgers and start selling
caviar and truffles.
'I got two sets of prints,' Todd said. 'One of them didn't look anything like
the ones on the wanted poster. I figured those were the postman's. The rest
were yours. I found more than eight compares. I found fourteen good ones.'
He grinned. 'And that's how I did it.'
'You are a little bastard,' Dussander said, and for a moment his eyes
shone dangerously. Todd felt a tingling little thrill, as he had in the hall.
Then Dussander slumped back again. 'Who have you told?'
'No one.'
'Not even this friend? This Cony Pegler?'
'Foxy. Foxy Pegler. Nah, he's a blabbermouth. I haven't told anybody.
There's nobody I trust that much.'
'What do you want? Money? There is none, I'm afraid. In South America
there was, although it was nothing as romantic or dangerous as the drug
trade. There is-there was -a kind of "old boy network" in Brazil and
Paraguay and Santo Domingo. Fugitives from the war. I became part of
their circle and made a fortune in minerals and ores-tin, copper, bauxite.
Then the changes came. Nationalism, anti-Americanism. I might have
ridden out the changes, but then Weisenthal's men caught my scent. Bad
luck follows bad luck, boy, like dogs after a bitch in heat. Twice they almost
had me; once I heard the Jew-bastards in the next room.
'They hung Eichmann,' he whispered. One hand went to his neck, and his
eyes had become as round as the eyes of a child listening to the darkest
passage of a scary tale -Hansel and Gretel, perhaps, or Bluebeard. 'He was
an old man, of no danger to anyone. He was apolitical. Still, they hung him.'
Todd nodded.
'At last, I went to the only people who could help me. They had helped
others, and I could run no more.'
'You went to the Odessa?' Todd asked eagerly.
'To the Sicilians,' Dussander said dryly, and Todd's face fell again. 'It was
arranged. False papers, false past. Would you care for a drink, boy?'
'Sure. You got a Coke?'
'No Coke.' He pronounced it Kok. 'Milk?'
'Milk.' Dussander went through the archway and into the kitchen. A
fluorescent bar buzzed into life. 'I live now on stock dividends,' his voice
came back. 'Stocks I picked up after the war under yet another name.
Through a bank in the State of Maine, if you please. The banker who
bought them for me went to jail for murdering his wife a year after I bought
them life is sometimes strange, boy, hein?'
A refrigerator door opened and closed.
"The Sicilian jackals didn't know about those stocks,' he said. Today they
are everywhere, but in those days, Boston was as far north as they could be
found. If they had known, they would have had those as well. They would
have picked me clean and sent me to America to starve on welfare and food
stamps.'
Todd heard a cupboard door open; he heard liquid poured into a glass.
'A little General Motors, a little American Telephone and Telegraph, a
hundred and fifty shares of Revion. All this banker's choices. Dufresne, his
name was-I remember, because it sounds a little like mine. It seems he was
not so smart at wife-killing as he was at picking growth stocks. The crime
passionnel, boy. It only proves that all men are donkeys who can read.'
He came back into the room, slippers whispering. He held two green
plastic glasses that looked like the premiums they sometimes give out at gas
station openings. When you filled your tank, you got a free glass.
Dussander thrust a glass at Todd.
'I lived adequately on the stock portfolio this Dufresne had set up for me
for the first five years. But then I sold my Diamond Match stock in order to
buy this house and a small cottage not far from Big Sur. Then, inflation.
Recession. I sold the cottage and one by one I sold the stocks, many of them
at fantastic profits. I wish to God I had bought more. But I thought I was
well-protected in other directions; the stocks were, as you Americans say, a
"flier"' He made a toothless hissing sound and snapped his fingers.
Todd was bored. He had not come here to listen to Dussander whine
about his money or mutter about his stocks. The thought of blackmailing
Dussander had never crossed Todd's mind. Money? What would he do with
it? He had his allowance; he had his paper route.
If his monetary needs went higher than what these could provide during
any given week, there was always someone who needed his lawn mowed.
Todd lifted his milk to his lips and then hesitated. His smile shone out
again an admiring smile. He extended the gas-station premium glass to
Dussander.
' You have some of it,' he said slyly.
Dussander stared at him for a moment, uncomprehending, and then rolled
his bloodshot eyes. 'Gruss Gott!' He took the glass, swallowed twice, and
handed it back. 'No gasping for breath. No clawing at the throat. No smell
of bitter almonds. It is milk, boy. Milk.
From the Dairylea Farms. On the carton is a picture of a smiling cow.'
Todd watched him warily for a moment, then took a small sip. Yes, it
tasted like milk, sure did, but somehow he didn't feel very thirsty anymore.
He put the glass down.
Dussander shrugged, raised his own glass-it contained a large knock of
whiskey-and took a swallow. He smacked his lips over it.
'Schnapps?' Todd asked.
'Bourbon. Ancient Age. Very nice. And cheap.'
Todd fiddled his fingers along the seams of his jeans.
'So,' Dussander said, 'if you have decided to have a "flier" of your own,
you should be aware that you have picked a worthless stock.'
'Huh?'
'Blackmail,' Dussander said. 'Isn't that what they call it on Mannix and
Hawaii Five-O and Barnaby Jones? Extortion. If that was what-'
But Todd was laughing-hearty, boyish laughter. He shook his head, tried
to speak, could not, and went on laughing.
'No,' Dussander said, and suddenly he looked grey and more frightened
than he had since he and Todd had begun to speak. He took another large
swallow of his drink, grimaced, and shuddered 'I see that is not it at least,
not the extortion of money. But, though you laugh, I smell extortion in it
somewhere. What is it? Why do you come here and disturb an old man!
Perhaps, as you say, I was once a Nazi. Gestapo, even. Now I am only old,
and to have a bowel movement I have to use a suppository. So what do you
want?' Todd had sobered again. He stared at Dussander with an open and
appealing frankness. 'Why I want to hear about it. That's all. That's all I
want. Really.'
'Hear about it?' Dussander echoed. He looked utterly perplexed. Todd
leaned forward, tanned elbows on bluejeaned knees. 'Sure. The firing
squads. The gas
chambers. The ovens. The guys who had to dig their own graves and then
stand on the ends so they'd fall into them. The ' His tongue came out and
wetted his lips. 'The examinations. The experiments. Everything. All the
gooshy stuff.' Dussander stared at him with a certain amazed detachment,
the way a veterinarian might stare at a cat who was giving birth to a
succession of two-headed kittens. 'You are a monster,' he said softly.
Todd sniffed. 'According to the books I read for my report, you're the
monster, Mr Dussander. Not me. You sent them to the ovens, not me. Two
thousand a day at Patin before you came, three thousand after, thirty-five-
hundred before the Russians came and made you stop. Himmler called you
an efficiency expert and gave you a medal. So you call me a monster. Oh
boy.'
'All of that is a filthy American lie,' Dussander said, stung. He set his
glass down with a bang, slopping bourbon onto his hands and the table. The
problem was not of my making, nor was the solution. I was given orders
and directives, which I followed.' Todd's smile widened; it was now almost
a smirk.
'Oh, I know how the Americans have distorted that,' Dussander muttered.
'But your own politicians make our Dr. Goebbels look like a child playing
with picture books in a kindergarten. They speak of morality while they
douse screaming children and old women in burning napalm. Your draft-
resisters are called cowards and "peaceniks". For refusing to follow orders
they are either put in jails or scourged from the country. Those who
demonstrate against this country's unfortunate Asian adventure are clubbed
down in the streets. The GI soldiers who kill the innocent are decorated by
Presidents, welcomed home from the bayoneting of children and the
burning of hospitals with parades and bunting. They are given dinners,
Keys to the City, free tickets to pro football games.' He toasted his glass in
Todd's direction. 'Only those who lose are tried as war criminals for
following orders and directives.' He drank and then had a coughing fit that
brought thin colour to his cheeks.
Through most of this Todd fidgeted the way he did when his parents
discussed whatever had been on the news that night-good old Walter
Klondike, his dad called him. He didn't care about Dussander's politics any
more than he cared about Dussander's stocks. His idea was that people
made up politics so they could do things. Like when he wanted to feel
around under Sharon Ackerman's dress last year. Sharon said it was bad for
him to want to do that, even though he could tell from her tone of voice that
the idea sort of excited her. So he told her he wanted to be a doctor when he
grew up and then she let him. That was politics. He wanted to hear about
German doctors trying to mate women with dogs, putting identical twins
into refrigerators to see whether they would die at the same time or if one of
them would last longer, and electroshock therapy, and operations without
anaesthetic, and German soldiers raping all the women they wanted. The
rest was just so much tired bullshit to cover up the gooshy stuff after
someone came along and put a stop to it 'If I hadn't followed orders, I would
have been dead.' Dussander was breathing hard, his upper body rocking
back and forth in the chair, making the springs squeak. A little cloud of
liquor-smell hung around him. "There was always the Russian front, nicht
wahr! Our leaders were madmen, granted, but does one argue with
madmen especially when the maddest of them all has the luck of Satan?
He escaped a brilliant assassination attempt by inches. Those who conspired
were strangled with piano-wire, strangled slowly. Their death-agonies were
filmed for the edification of the elite-'
'Yeah! Neat!' Todd cried impulsively. 'Did you see that movie?'
'Yes. I saw. We all saw what happened to those unwilling or unable to run
before the wind and wait for the storm to end. What we did then was the
right thing.
For that time and that place, it was the right thing. I would do it again.
But' His eyes dropped to his glass. It was empty.
' but I don't wish to speak of it, or even think of it. What we did was
motivated only by survival, and nothing about survival is pretty. I had
dreams' He slowly took a cigarette from the box on the TV. 'Yes. For years
I had them. Blackness, and sounds in the blackness. Tractor engines.
Bulldozer engines. Gunbutts thudding against what might have been frozen
earth, or human skulls. Whistles, sirens, pistol-shots, screams. The doors of
cattle-cars rumbling open on cold winter afternoons.
Then, in my dreams, all sounds would stop-and eyes would open in the
dark, gleaming like the eyes of animals in a rainforest For many years I
lived on the edge of the jungle, and I suppose that is why it is always the
jungle I smelled and felt in those dreams. When I woke from them I would
be drenched with sweat, my heart thundering in my chest, my hand stuffed
into my mouth to stifle the screams. And I would think: the dream is the
truth. Brazil, Paraguay, Cuba those places are the dream. In the reality I
am still at Patin. The Russians are closer today than yesterday. Some of
them are remembering that in 1943 they had to eat frozen German corpses
to stay alive. Now they long to drink hot German blood. There were
rumours, boy, that some of them did just that when they crossed into
Germany: cut the throats of some prisoners and drank their blood out of a
boot. I would wake up and think: The work must go on, if only so there is
no evidence of what we did here, or so little that the world, which doesn't
want to believe it, won't have to. I would think: The work must go on if we
are to survive.'
Unlike what had gone before, Todd listened to this with close attention
and great interest This was pretty good, but he was sure there would be
better stuff in the days ahead. All Dussander needed was a little prodding.
Heck, he was lucky. Lots of men his age were senile.
Dussander dragged deeply on his cigarette. 'Later, after the dreams went
away, there were days when I would think I had seen someone from Patin.
Never guards or fellow officers, always inmates. I remember one afternoon
in West Germany, ten years ago. There was an accident on the autobahn.
Traffic was frozen in every lane. I sat in my Morris, listening to the radio,
waiting for the traffic to move. I looked to my right. There was a very old
Simca in the next lane, and the man behind the wheel was looking at me.
He was perhaps fifty, and he looked ill. There was a scar on his cheek. His
hair was white, short, cut badly. I looked away. The minutes passed and still
the traffic didn't move. I began snatching glances at the man in the Simca.
Every time I did, he was looking at me, his face as still as death, his eyes
sunken in their sockets. I became convinced he had been at Patin. He had
been there and he had recognized me.'
Dussander wiped a hand across his eyes.
'It was winter. The man was wearing an overcoat. But I was convinced
that if I got out of my car and went to him, made him take off his coat and
push up his shirtsleeves, I would see the number on his arm.
'At last the traffic began to move again. I pulled away from the Simca. If
the jam had lasted another ten minutes, I believe I would have gotten out of
my car and pulled the old man out of his. I would have beaten him, number
or no number. I would have beaten him for looking at me that way.
Shortly after that, I left Germany forever.'
'Lucky for you,' Todd said.
Dussander shrugged. 'It was the same everywhere. Havana, Mexico City,
Rome. I was in Rome for three years, you know. I would see a man looking
at me over his capuccino in a cafe a woman in a hotel lobby who seemed
more interested
in me than in her magazine a waiter in a restaurant who would keep
glancing at me no matter who he was serving.
I would become convinced that these people were studying me, and that
night the dream would come-the sounds, the jungle, the eyes.
'But when I came to America, I put it out of my mind. I go to movies. I
eat out once a week, always at one of those fast-food places that are so
clean and so well-lighted by fluorescent bars. Here at my house I do jigsaw
puzzles and I read novels-most of them bad ones-and watch TV. At night I
drink until I'm sleepy. The dreams don't come anymore. When I see
someone looking at me in the supermarket or the library or the
tobacconist's, I think it must be because I look like their grandfather or an
old teacher or a neighbour in a town they left some years ago.' He shook
his head at Todd.
'Whatever happened at Patin, it happened to another man. Not to me.'
'Great!' Todd said. 'I want to hear all about it.'
Dussander's eyes squeezed closed, and then opened slowly. 'You don't
understand. I do not wish to speak of it.'
'You will, though. If you don't, I'll tell everyone who you are.'
Dussander stared at him, grey-faced. 'I knew,' he said, 'that I would find
the extortion sooner or later.'
'Today I want to hear about the gas ovens,' Todd said. 'How you baked
the Jews.' His smile beamed out, rich and radiant. 'But put your teeth in
before you start You look better with your teeth in.'
Dussander did as he was told. He talked to Todd about the gas ovens until
Todd had to go home for lunch. Every time he tried to slip over into
generalities, Todd would frown severely and ask him specific questions to
get him back on the track. Dussander drank a great deal as he talked. He
didn't smite.
Todd smiled. Todd smiled enough for both of them.
2
August, 1974.
They sat on Dussander's back porch under a cloudless, smiling sky. Todd
was wearing jeans, Keds, and his Little League shirt Dussander was
wearing a baggy grey shirt and shapeless khaki pants held up with
suspenders-wino-pants, Todd thought with private contempt; they looked
like they had come straight from a box in the back of the Salvation Army
store downtown. He was really going to have to do something about the
way Dussander dressed when he was at home. It spoiled some of the fun.
The two of them were eating Big Macs that Todd had brought in his bike
basket, pedalling fast so they wouldn't get cold. Todd was sipping a Coke
through a plastic straw.
Dussander had a glass of bourbon.
His old man's voice rose and fell, papery, hesitant, sometimes nearly
inaudible. His faded blue eyes, threaded with the usual snaps of red, were
never still. An observer might have thought them grandfather and grandson,
the latter perhaps attending some rite of passage, a handing down.
'And that's all I remember,' Dussander finished presently, and took a large
bite of his sandwich. McDonald's Secret Sauce dribbled down his chin.
'You can do better than that,' Todd said softly.
Dussander took a large swallow from his glass. "The uniforms were
made of paper,' he said finally, almost snarling. 'When one inmate died, the
uniform was passed on if it could still be worn. Sometimes one paper
uniform could dress as many as forty inmates.
I received high marks for my frugality.'
'From Glucks?'
'From Himmler.'
'But there was a clothing factory in Patin. You told me that just last week.
Why didn't you have the uniforms made there? The inmates themselves
could have made them.'
"The job of the factory in Patin was to make uniforms for German
soldiers. And as for us' Dussander's voice faltered for a moment, and then
he forced himself to go on. 'We were not in the business of rehabilitation,'
he finished.
Todd smiled his broad smile.
'Enough for today? Please? My throat is sore.'
'You shouldn't smoke so much, then,' Todd said, continuing to smile. 'Tell
me some more about the uniforms.'
'Which? Inmate or SS?' Dussander's voice was resigned.
Smiling, Todd said: 'Both.'
3
September, 1974.
Todd was in the kitchen of his house, making himself a peanut butter and
jelly sandwich.
You got to the kitchen by going up half a dozen redwood steps to a raised
area that gleamed with chrome and Formica. His mother's electric
typewriter had been going steadily ever since Todd had gotten home from
school. She was typing a master's thesis for a grad student. The grad student
had short hair, wore thick glasses, and looked like a creature from outer
space, in Todd's humble opinion. The thesis was on the effect of fruitflies in
the Salinas Valley after World War II, or some good shit like that. Now her
typewriter stopped and she came out of her office.
'Todd-baby,' she greeted him.
'Monica-baby,' he hailed back, amiably enough.
His mother wasn't a bad-looking chick for thirty-six, Todd thought;
blonde hair that was streaked ash in a couple of places, tall, shapely, now
dressed in dark red shorts and a sheer blouse of a warm whiskey colour-the
blouse was casually knotted below her breasts, putting her flat, unlined
midriff on show. A typewriter eraser was tucked into her hair, which had
been pinned carelessly back with a turquoise clip. 'So how's school?' she
asked him, coming up the steps into the kitchen. She brushed his lips
casually with hers and then slid onto one of the stools in front of the
breakfast counter. 'School's cool.'
'Going to be on the honour roll again?'
'Sure.' Actually, he thought his grades might slip a notch this first quarter.
He had been spending a lot of time with Dussander, and when he wasn't
actually with the old Kraut, he was thinking about the things Dussander had
told him. Once or twice he had dreamed about the things Dussander had
told him. But it was nothing he couldn't handle. 'Apt pupil,' she said,
ruffling his shaggy blond hair. 'How's that sandwich?'
'Good,' he said.
'Would you make me one and bring it into my office?"
'Can't,' he said, getting up. 'I promised Mr. Denker I'd come over and read
to him for an hour or so.'
'Are you still on Robinson Crusoe?'
'Nope.' He showed her the spine of a thick book he had bought in a junk
shop for twenty cents. 'Tom Jones.'
'Ye gods and little fishes! It'll take you the whole school-year to get
through that, Todd-baby. Couldn't you at least find an abridged edition, like
with Crusoe?'
'Probably, but he wanted to hear all of this one. He said so.'
'Oh.' She looked at him for a moment, then hugged him. It was rare for
her to be so demonstrative, and it made Todd a little uneasy. 'You're a peach
to be taking so much of your spare time to read to him. Your father and I
think it's just just exceptional.' Todd cast his eyes down modestly.
'And to not want to tell anybody,' she said. 'Hiding your light under a
bushel.'
'Oh, the kids I hang around with-they'd probably think I was some kind
of weirdo,' Todd said, smiling modestly down at the floor. 'All that good
shit.'
'Don't say that,' she admonished absently. Then: 'Do you think Mr Denker
would like to come over and have dinner with us some night?'
'Maybe,' Todd said vaguely. 'Listen, I gotta put an egg in my shoe and
beat it.'
'Okay. Supper at six-thirty. Don't forget.'
'I won't.'
'Your father's got to work late so it'll just be me and thee again, okay?'
'Crazy, baby.'
She watched him go with a fond smile, hoping there was nothing in Tom
Jones he shouldn't be reading; he was only thirteen. She didn't suppose
there was. He was growing up in a society where magazines like Penthouse
were available to anyone with a dollar and a quarter, or to any kid who
could reach up to the top shelf of the magazine rack and grab a quick peek
before the clerk could shout for him to put that up and get lost. In a society
that seemed to believe most of all in the creed of hump thy neighbour, she
didn't think there could be much in a book two hundred years old to screw
up Todd's head -although she supposed the old man might get off on it a
little. And as Richard liked to say, for a kid the whole world's a laboratory.
You have to let them poke around in it. And if the kid in question has a
healthy home life and loving parents, he'll be all the stronger for having
knocked around a few strange corners.
And there went the healthiest kid she knew, pedalling up the street on his
Schwinn. We did okay by the lad, she thought, turning to make her
sandwich. Damned if we didn't do okay.
4
October, 1974.
Dussander had lost weight. They sat in the kitchen, the shopworn copy of
Tom Jones between them on the oilcloth-covered table (Todd, who tried
never to miss a trick, had purchased the Cliffs Notes on the book with part
of his allowance and had carefully read the entire summary against the
possibility that his mother or father might ask him questions about the plot).
Todd was eating a Ring-Ding he had bought at the market. He had bought
one for Dussander, but Dussander hadn't touched it He only looked at it
morosely from time to time as he drank his bourbon. Todd hated to see
anything as tasty as Ring-Dings go to waste. If he didn't eat it pretty quick,
Todd was going to ask him if he could have it 'So how did the stuff get to
Patin?' he asked Dussander.
'In railroad cars,' Dussander said. 'In railroad cars labelled MEDICAL
SUPPLIES. It came in long crates that looked like coffins. Fitting, I
suppose. The inmates off-loaded the crates and stacked them in the
infirmary. Later, our own men stacked them in the storage sheds. They did
it at night. The storage sheds were behind the showers.'
'Was it always Zyklon-B?'
'No, from time to time we would be sent something else. Experimental
gases. The High Command was always interested in improving efficiency.
Once they sent us a gas code-named PEGASUS. A nerve-gas. Thank God
they never sent it again. It -' Dussander saw Todd lean forward, saw those
eyes sharpen, and he suddenly stopped and gestured casually with his gas-
station-premium glass. 'It didn't work very well,' he said. 'It was quite
boring.'
But Todd was not fooled, not in the least. 'What did it do?'
'It killed them-what do you think it did, made them walk on water? It
killed them, that's all.'
'Tell me.'
'No,' Dussander said, now unable to hide the horror he felt. He hadn't
thought of PEGASUS in how long? Ten years? Twenty? 'I won't tell you! I
refuse!'
'Tell me,' Todd repeated, licking chocolate icing from his fingers. Tell me
or you know what.'
Yes, Dussander thought I know what. Indeed I do, you putrid little
monster. 'It made them dance,' he said reluctantly.
'Dance?'
'Like the Zyklon-B, it came in through the shower-heads. And they they
began to vomit, and to to defecate helplessly.'
'Wow,' Todd said. 'Shit themselves, huh?' He pointed at the Ring-Ding on
Dussander's plate. He had finished his own. 'You going to eat that?'
Dussander didn't reply. His eyes were hazed with memory. His face was
far away and cold, like the dark side of a planet which does not rotate.
Inside his mind he felt the queerest combination of revulsion and-could it
be?-nostalgia!
'They began to twitch all over and to make high, strange sounds in their
throats. My men they called PEGASUS the Yodeling Gas. At last they all
collapsed and just lay there on the floor in their own filth, they lay there,
yes, they lay there on the concrete, screaming and yodeling, with bloody
noses. But I lied, boy. The gas didn't kill them, either because it wasn't
strong enough or because we couldn't bring ourselves to wait long enough. I
suppose it was that. Men and women like that could not have lived long.
Finally I sent in five men with rifles to end their agonies. It would have
looked bad on my record if it had shown up, I've no doubt of that -it would
have looked like a waste of cartridges at a time when the Fuehrer had
declared every cartridge a national resource. But those five men I trusted.
There were times, boy,
when I thought I would never forget the sound they made. The yodeling
sound. The laughing.'
'Yeah, I bet,' Todd said. He finished Dussander's Ring-Ding in two bites.
Waste not, want not, Todd's mother said on the rare occasions when Todd
complained about left-overs. 'That was a good story, Mr Dussander. You
always tell them good. Once I get you going.' Todd smiled at him. And
incredibly-certainly not because he wanted to-Dussander found himself
smiling back.
5
November, 1974.
Dick Bowden, Todd's father, looked remarkably like a movie and TV
actor named Lloyd Bochner. He-Bowden, not Bochner-was thirty-eight. He
was a thin, narrow man who liked to dress in Ivy League style shirts and
solid-colour suits, usually dark. When he was on a construction site, he
wore khakis and a hard-hat that was a souvenir of his Peace Corps days,
when he had helped to design and build two dams in Africa. When he was
working in his study at home, he wore half-glasses that had a way of
slipping down to the end of his nose and making him look like a college
dean. He was wearing these glasses now as he tapped his son's first-quarter
report card against his desk's gleaming glass top. 'One B. Four Cs. One D.
A D, for Christ's sake! Todd, your mother's not showing it, but she's really
upset.'
Todd dropped his eyes. He didn't smile. When his dad swore, that wasn't
exactly the best of news.
'My God, you've never gotten a report like this. A D in Beginning
Algebra? What is this?'
'I don't know, Dad.' He looked humbly at his knees.
'Your mother and I think that maybe you've been spending a little too
much time with Mr Denker. Not hitting the books enough. We think you
ought to cut it down to weekends, slugger. At least until we see where
you're going academically '
Todd looked up, and for a single second Bowden thought he saw a wild,
pallid anger in his son's eyes. His own eyes widened, his fingers clenched
on Todd's buff-coloured report card and then it was just Todd, looking at
him openly if rather unhappily. Had that anger really been there? Surely not.
But the moment had unsettled him, made it hard for him to know exactly
how to proceed. Todd hadn't been mad, and Dick Bowden didn't want to
make him mad. He and his son were friends, always had been friends, and
Dick wanted things to stay that way. They had no secrets from each other,
none at all (except for the fact that Dick Bowden was sometimes unfaithful
with his secretary, but that wasn't exactly the sort of thing you told your
thirteen-year-old son, was it? and besides, that had absolutely no bearing
on his home life, his, family life). That was the way it was supposed to be,
the way it had to be in a cockamamie world where murderers went
unpunished, high-school kids skin-popped heroin, and junior high
schoolers-kids Todd's age-turned up with VD.
'No, Dad, please don't do that. I mean, don't punish Mr Denker for
something that's my fault. I mean, he'd be lost without me. I'll do better.
Really. That algebra it just threw me to start with. But I went over to Ben
Tremaine's, and after we studied together for a few days, I started to get it.
It just I dunno, I sorta choked at first.'
'I think you're spending too much time with him,' Bowden said, but he
was weakening. It was hard to refuse Todd, hard to disappoint him, and
what he said about
punishing the old man for Todd's falling-off goddammit, it made sense.
The old man looked forward to his visits so much.
'That Mr Storrman, the algebra teacher, is really hard,' Todd said. 'Lots of
kids got Ds. Three or four got Fs.'
Bowden nodded thoughtfully.
'I won't go Wednesdays anymore. Not until I bring my grades up.' He had
read his father's eyes. 'And instead of going out for anything at school, I'll
stay after every day and study. I promise.'
'You really like the old guy that much?'
'He's really neat,' Todd said sincerely.
'Well okay. We'll try it your way, slugger. But I want to see a big
improvement in your marks come January, you understand me? I'm thinking
of your future. You may think junior high's too soon to start thinking about
that, but it's not. Not by a long chalk.' As his mother liked to say Waste not,
want not, so Dick Bowden liked to say Not by a long chalk.
'I understand, dad,' Todd said gravely. Man to man stuff.
'Get out of here and give those books a workout then.' He pushed his
half-glasses up on his nose and clapped Todd on the shoulder.
Todd's smile, broad and bright, broke across his face. 'Right on, dad!'
Bowden watched Todd go with a prideful smile of his own. One in a
million. And that hadn't been anger on Todd's face. For sure. Pique, maybe
but not that high-voltage emotion he had at first thought he'd seen there. If
Todd was that mad, he would have known; he could read his son like a
book. It had always been that way.
Whistling, his fatherly duty discharged, Dick Bowden unrolled a
blueprint and bent over it 6 December, 1974.
The face that came in answer to Todd's insistent finger on the bell was
haggard and yellowed. The hair, which had been lush in July, had now
begun to recede from the bony brow; it looked lustreless and brittle.
Dussander's body, thin to begin with, was now gaunt although, Todd
thought, he was nowhere near as gaunt as the inmates who had once been
delivered into his hands.
Todd's left hand had been behind his back when Dussander came to the
door. Now he brought it out and handed a wrapped package to Dussander.
'Merry Christmas!' he yelled.
Dussander had cringed from the box; now he took it with no expression
of pleasure or surprise. He handled it gingerly, as if it might contain
explosive. Beyond the porch, it was raining. It had been raining off and on
for almost a week, and Todd had carried the box inside his coat. It was
wrapped in gay foil and ribbon.
'What is it?' Dussander asked without enthusiasm as they went to the
kitchen.
'Open it and see.'
Todd took a can of Coke from his jacket pocket and put it on the red and
white checked oilcloth that covered the kitchen table. 'Better pull down the
shades,' he said confidentially.
Distrust immediately leaked onto Dussander's face. 'Oh? Why?'
'Well you can never tell who's looking,' Todd said, smiling. 'Isn't that
how you got along all those years? By seeing the people who might be
looking before they saw you?'
Dussander pulled down the kitchen shades. Then he poured himself a
glass of bourbon.
Then he pulled the bow off the package. Todd had wrapped it the way
boys so often wrap Christmas packages-boys who have more important
things on their minds,
things like football and street hockey and the Friday Nite Creature
Feature you'll watch with a friend who's sleeping over, the two of you
wrapped in a blanket and crammed together on one end of the couch,
laughing. There were a lot of ragged corners, a lot of uneven seams, a lot of
Scotch tape. It spoke of impatience with such a womanly thing.
Dussander was a little touched in spite of himself. And later, when the
horror had receded a little, he thought: I should have known, It was a
uniform. An SS uniform. Complete with jackboots.
He looked numbly from the contents of, the box to its cardboard cover:
PETER'S QUALITY COSTUME CLOTHIERS-AT THE SAME
LOCATION SINCE 1951!
'No,' he said softly. 'I won't put it on. This is where it ends, boy. I'll die
before I put it on.'
'Remember what they did to Eichmann,' Todd said solemnly. 'He was an
old man and he had no politics. Isn't that what you said? Besides, I saved
the whole fall for it. It cost over eighty bucks, with the boots thrown in. You
didn't mind wearing it in 1944, either. Not at all.'
'You little bastard.' Dussander raised one fist over his head. Todd didn't
flinch at all. He stood his ground, eyes shining.
'Yeah,' he said softly. 'Go ahead and touch me. You just touch me once.'
Dussander lowered the hand. His lips were quivering. 'You are a fiend
from hell,' he muttered.
'Put it on,' Todd invited.
Dussander's hands went to the tie of his robe and paused there. His eyes,
sheeplike and begging, looked into Todd's. 'Please,' he said. 'I am an old
man. No more.'
Todd shook his head slowly but firmly. His eyes were still shining. He
liked it when Dussander begged. The way they must have begged him once.
The inmates at Patin.
Dussander let the robe fall to the floor and stood naked except for his
slippers and his boxer shorts. His chest was sunken, his belly slightly
bloated. His arms were scrawny old man's arms. But the uniform, Todd
thought The uniform will make a difference.
Slowly, Dussander took the tunic out of the box and began to put it on.
Ten minutes later he stood fully dressed in the SS uniform. The cap was
slightly askew, the shoulders slumped, but still the death's-head insignia
stood out clearly. Dussander had a dark dignity-at least in Todd's eyes-that
he had not possessed earlier. In spite of his slump, in spite of the cockeyed
angle of his feet, Todd was pleased. For the first time Dussander looked to
Todd as Todd believed he should look. Older, yes. Defeated, certainly. But
in uniform again. Not an old man spinning away his sunset years watching
Lawrence Welk on a cruddy black and white TV with tinfoil on the rabbit-
ears, but Kurt Dussander, the Blood Fiend of Patin.
As for Dussander, he felt disgust, discomfort and a mild, sneaking sense
of relief. He partly despised this latter emotion, recognizing it as the truest
indicator yet of the psychological domination the boy had established over
him. He was the boy's prisoner, and every time he found he could live
through yet another indignity, every time he felt that mild relief, the boy's
power grew. And yet he was relieved. It was only cloth and buttons and
snaps and it was a sham at that. The fly was a zipper; it should have been
buttons. The insignia was wrong, the tailoring sloppy, the boots a
cheap grade of imitation leather. It was only a trumpery uniform after ail,
and it wasn't exactly killing him, was it? No. It-'Straighten your cap!' Todd
said loudly.
Dussander blinked at him, startled.
'Straighten your cap, soldier.' Dussander did so, unconsciously giving it
that final small insolent twist that had been the trademark of his
Oberleutnants-and, sadly wrong as it was, this was a Oberleutnant's
uniform.
'Get those feet together!'
He did so, bringing the heels together with a smart rap, doing the correct
thing with hardly a thought, doing it as if the intervening years had slipped
off along with his bathrobe.
'Achtung?'
He snapped to attention, and for a moment Todd was scared-really
scared. He felt like the sorcerer's apprentice, who had brought the brooms to
life but who had not possessed enough skill to stop them once they got
started. The old man living on his pension was gone. Dussander was here.
Then his fear was replaced by a tingling sense of power.
'Aboutface!'
Dussander pivoted neatly, the bourbon forgotten, the torment of the last
three months forgotten. He heard his heels click together again as he faced
the grease-splattered stove.
Beyond it, he could see the dusty parade ground of the military academy
where he had learned his soldier's trade.
'About face!'
He whirled again, this time not executing the order as well, losing his
balance
a little.
Once it would have been ten demerits and the butt of a swagger-stick in
his belly, sending his breath out in a hot and agonized gust. Inwardly he
smiled a little. The boy didn't know all the tricks. No indeed.
'Now march!' Todd cried. His eyes were hot, glowing.
The iron went out of Dussander's shoulders; he slumped forward again.
'No,'
he said.
'Please -'
'March! March! March, I said!'
With a strangled sound, Dussander began to goose-step across the faded
linoleum of his kitchen floor. He right-faced to avoid the table; right-faced
again as he approached the wall. His face was uptilted slightly,
expressionless. His legs rammed out before him, then crashed down,
making the cheap china rattle in the cabinet over the sink. His arms moved
in short arcs.
The image of the walking brooms recurred to Todd, and his fright
recurred with it. It suddenly struck him that he didn't want Dussander to be
enjoying any part of this, and that perhaps-just perhaps-he had wanted to
make Dussander appear ludicrous even more than he had wanted to make
him appear authentic. But somehow, despite the man's age and the cheap
dime-store furnishings of the kitchen, he didn't look ludicrous in the least.
He looked frightening. For the first time the corpses in the ditches and the
crematoriums seemed to take on their own reality for Todd. The
photographs of the tangled arms and legs and torsos, fishbelly white in the
cold spring rains of Germany, were not something staged like a scene in a
horror film- a pile of bodies created from department store dummies, say, to
be picked up by the grips and propmen when the scene was done-but simply
a real fact, stupendous and
inexplicable and evil. For a moment it seemed to him that he could smell
the bland and slightly smoky odour of decomposition.
Terror gathered him in.
'Stop!' he shouted.
Dussander continued to goose-step, his eyes blank and far away. His head
had come up even more, pulling the scrawny chicken-tendons of his throat
tight, tilting his chin at an arrogant angle. His nose, blade-thin, jutted
obscenely.
Todd felt sweat in his armpits. 'Halt!' he cried out.
Dussander halted, right foot forward, left coming up and then down
beside the right with a single pistonlike stamp. For a moment the cold lack
of expression held on his face-robotic, mindless-and then it was replaced by
confusion. Confusion was followed by defeat. He slumped.
Todd let out a silent breath of relief and for a moment he was furious
with himself. 'Who's in charge here, anyway' Then his self-confidence
flooded back in. I am, that's who. And he better not forget it.
He began to smile again. 'Pretty good. But with a little practice, I think
you'll be a lot better.'
Dussander stood mute, his head hanging.
'You can take it off now,' Todd added generously and couldn't help
wondering if he really wanted Dussander to put it on again. For a few
seconds there-
7
January, 1975.
Todd left school by himself after the last bell, got his bike, and pedalled
down to the park.
He found a deserted bench, set his Schwinn up on its kickstand, and took
his report card out of his hip pocket. He took a look around to see if there
was anyone in the area he knew, but the only other people in sight were two
high school kids making out by the pond and a pair of gross-looking winos
passing a paper bag back and forth. Dirty fucking winos, he thought, but it
wasn't the winos that had upset him. He opened his card.
English: C. American History: C. Earth Science: D. Your Community
and You: B.
Primary French: F. Beginning Algebra: F.
He stared at the grades, unbelieving. He had known it was going to be
bad, but this was disaster.
Maybe that's best, an inner voice spoke up suddenly. Maybe you even did
it on purpose, because a part of you wants it to end. Needs for it to end.
Before something bad happens.
He shoved the thought roughly aside. Nothing bad was going to happen.
Dussander was under his thumb. Totally under his thumb. The old man
thought one of Todd's friends had a letter, but he didn't know which friend.
If anything happened to Todd-anything-that letter would go to the police.
Once he supposed Dussander might have tried it anyway. Now he was too
old to run, even with a head start.
'He's under control, dammit,' Todd whispered, and then pounded his thigh
hard enough to make the muscle knot. Talking to yourself was bad shit-
crazy people talked to themselves. He had picked up the habit over the last
six weeks or so, and didn't seem to be able to break it. He'd caught several
people looking at him strangely
because of it. A couple of them had been teachers. And that asshole
Bernie Everson had come right out and asked him if he was going
fruitcrackers. Todd had come very, very close to punching the little pansy in
the mouth, and that sort of stuff-brawls, scuffles, punch-outs-was no good.
That sort of stuff got you noticed in all the wrong ways. Talking to yourself
was bad, right, okay, but-'The dreams are bad, too,' he whispered. He didn't
catch himself that time. Just lately the dreams had been very bad. In the
dreams he was always in uniform and he was standing in line with hundreds
of gaunt men; the smell of burning was in the air and he could hear the
choppy roar of bulldozer engines. Then Dussander would come up the line,
pointing out this one or that one. They were left. The others were marched
away towards the crematoriums. Some of them kicked and struggled, but
most were too undernourished, too exhausted. Then Dussander was
standing in front of Todd. Their eyes met for a long, paralyzing moment,
and then Dussander levelled a faded umbrella at Todd.
'Take this one to the laboratories,' Dussander said in the dream. His lip
curled back to reveal his false teeth. 'Take this American boy'
In another dream he wore an SS uniform. His jackboots were shined to a
mirror-reflecting surface. The death's head insignia and the lightning bolts
glittered. But he was standing in the middle of Santa Donate Boulevard and
everyone was looking at him. They began to point. Some of them began to
laugh. Others looked shocked, angry, or revolted. In this dream an old car
came to a squealing, creaky halt and Dussander peered out at him, a
Dussander who looked two hundred years old and nearly mummified, his
skin a yellowed scroll.
'I know you!' The dream-Dussander proclaimed shrilly. He looked around
at the spectators and then back to Todd. 'You were in charge at Patin! Look,
everybody! This is the Blood-Fiend of Patin! Himmler's "Efficiency
Expert"! I denounce you, murderer! I denounce you, butcher! I denounce
you, killer of infants! I denounce you!' In yet another dream, he wore a
striped convict's uniform and was being led down a stone-walled corridor
by two guards who looked like his parents. Both wore conspicuous yellow
armbands with the Star of David on them. Walking behind them was a
minister, reading from the Book of Deuteronomy. Todd looked back over
his shoulder and saw that the minister was Dussander, and he was wearing
the black cloak of an SS officer. At the end of the stone corridor, double
doors opened on an octagonal room with glass walls. There was a scaffold
in the centre of it. Behind the glass walls stood ranks of emaciated men and
women, all naked, all watching with the same dark, flat expression. On each
arm was a blue number.
'It's all right,' Todd whispered to himself. 'It's okay, really, everything's
under control.' The couple that had been making out glanced over at him.
Todd stared at them fiercely, daring them to say anything. At last they
looked back the other way. Had the boy been grinning?
Todd got up, jammed his report card into his hip pocket, and mounted his
bike. He pedalled down to a drugstore two blocks away. There he bought a
bottle of ink eradicator and a fine-point pen that dispensed blue ink. He
went back to the park (the make-out couple was gone, but the winos were
still there, stinking the place up) and changed his English grade to a B,
American History to A, Earth Science to B, Primary French to C, and
Beginning Algebra to B. Your Community and You he eradicated and then
simply wrote in again, so the card would have a uniform look. Uniforms,
right.
'Never mind,' he whispered to himself. 'That'll hold them. That'll hold
them, all right. ' One night late in the month, sometime after two o'clock,
Kurt Dussander awoke struggling with the bedclothes, gasping and
moaning, into a darkness that
seemed close and terrifying. He felt half-suffocated, paralyzed with fear.
It was as if a heavy stone lay on his chest, and he wondered if he could be
having a heart attack. He clawed in the darkness for the bedside lamp and
almost knocked it off the nightstand turning it on. I'm in my own room, he
thought, my own bedroom, here in Santa Donate, here in California, here in
America. See, the same brown drapes pulled across the same window, the
same bookshelves filled with dime paperbacks from the bookshop on Soren
Street, same grey rug, same blue wallpaper. No heart attack. No jungle. No
eyes. But the terror still clung to him like a stinking pelt, and his heart went
on racing. The dream had come back. He had known that it would, sooner
or later, if the boy kept on. The cursed boy. He thought the boy's letter of
protection was only a bluff, and not a very good one at that; something he
had picked up from the TV detective programmes. What friend would the
boy trust not to open such a momentous letter? No friend, that was who. Or
so he thought If he could be sure-His hands closed with an arthritic, painful
snap and then opened slowly. He took the packet of cigarettes from the
table and lit one, scratching the wooden match indifferently on the bedpost.
The clock's hands stood at 2:41. There would be no more sleep for him this
night He inhaled smoke and then coughed it out in a series of wracking
spasms. No more sleep unless he wanted to go downstairs and have a drink
or two. Or three. And there had been altogether too much drinking over the
last six weeks or so. He was no longer a young man who could toss them
off one after the other, the way he had when he had been an officer on leave
in Berlin in '39, when the scent of victory had been in the air and
everywhere you heard the Fuehrer's voice, saw his blazing, commanding
eyes-The boy the cursed boy!
'Be honest,' he said aloud, and the sound of his own voice in the quiet
room made him jump a little. He was not in the habit of talking to himself,
but neither was it the first time he had ever done so. He remembered doing
it off and on during the last few weeks at Patin, when everything had come
down around their ears and in the east the sound of Russian thunder grew
louder first every day and then every hour. It had been natural enough to
talk to himself then. He had been under stress, and people under stress often
do strange things-cup their testicles through the pockets of their pants, click
their teeth together Wolff had been a great teeth-clicker. He grinned as he
did it. Huffman had been a finger-snapper and a thigh-patter, creating fast,
intricate rhythms that he seemed utterly unaware of. He, Kurt Dussander,
had sometimes talked to himself. But now-'You are under stress again,' he
said aloud. He was aware that he had spoken in German this time. He hadn't
spoken German in many years, but the language now seemed warm and
comfortable. It lulled him, eased him. It was sweet and dark. 'Yes. You are
under stress. Because of the boy. But be honest with yourself. It is too early
in the morning to tell lies. You have not entirely regretted talking. At first
you were terrified that the boy could not or would not keep his secret. He
would have to tell a friend, who would tell another friend, and that friend
would tell two. But if he has kept it this long, he will keep it longer. If I am
taken away, he loses his his talking book. Is that what I am to him? I think
so.'
He fell silent, but his thoughts went on. He had been lonely -no one
would ever know just how lonely. There had been times when he thought
almost seriously of suicide. He made a bad hermit. The voices he heard
came from the radio. The only people who visited were on the other side of
a dirty glass square. He was an old man, and although he was afraid of
death, he was more afraid of being an old man who is alone. His bladder
sometimes tricked him. He would be halfway to the bathroom when a dark
stain spread on his pants. In wet weather his joints would first throb and
then begin to cry out, and there had been days when he had chewed an
entire tin of
Arthritis Pain Formula between sunrise and sunset and still the aspirin
only subdued the aches, and even such acts as taking a book from the shelf
or switching the TV channel became an essay in pain. His eyes were bad;
sometimes he knocked things over, barked his shins, bumped his head. He
lived in fear of breaking a bone and not being able to get to the telephone,
and he lived in fear of getting there and having some doctor uncover his
real past as he became suspicious of Mr. Denker's nonexistent medical
history. The boy had alleviated some of those things. When the boy was
here, he could call back the old days. His memory of those days was
perversely clear; he spilled out a seemingly endless catalogue of names and
events, even the weather of such and such a day. He remembered Private
Henreid, who manned a machine-gun in the north-east tower and the wen
Private Henreid had had between his eyes. Some of the men called him
Three-Eyes, or Old Cyclops. He remembered Kessel, who had a picture of
his girlfriend naked, lying on a sofa with her hands behind her head. Kessel
charged the men to look at it. He remembered the names of the doctors and
their experiments-thresholds of pain, the brainwaves of dying men and
women, physiological retardation, effects of different sorts of radiation,
dozens more. Hundreds more.
He supposed he talked to the boy as all old men talk, but he guessed he
was luckier than most old men, who had impatience, disinterest, or outright
rudeness for an audience. His audience was endlessly fascinated. Were a
few bad dreams too high a price to pay?
He crushed out his cigarette, lay looking at the ceiling for a moment, and
then swung his feet out onto the floor. He and the boy were loathesome, he
supposed, feeding off each other eating each other. If his own belly was
sometimes sour with the dark but rich food they partook of in his afternoon
kitchen, what was the boy's like? Did he sleep well? Perhaps not. Lately
Dussander thought the boy looked rather pale, and thinner than when he had
first come into Dussander's life. He walked across the bedroom and opened
the closet door. He brushed hangers to the right, reached into the shadows,
and brought out the sham uniform. It hung from his hand like a vulture-
skin. He touched it with his other hand. Touched it and then stroked it.
After a very long time he took it down and put it on, dressing slowly, not
looking into the mirror until the uniform was completely buttoned and
belted (and the sham fly zipped).
He looked at himself in the mirror, then, and nodded.
He went back to bed, lay down, and smoked another cigarette. When it
was finished, he felt sleepy again. He turned off the bedlamp, not believing
it, that it could be this easy.
But he was asleep five minutes later, and this time his sleep was
dreamless.
8
February, 1975.
After dinner, Dick Bowden produced a cognac that Dussander privately
thought dreadful.
But of course he smiled broadly and complimented it extravagantly.
Bowden's wife served the boy a chocolate malted. The boy had been
unusually quiet all through the meal. Uneasy? Yes. For some reason the boy
seemed very uneasy.
Dussander had charmed Dick and Monica Bowden from the moment he
and the boy had arrived. The boy had told his parents that Mr Denker's
vision was much worse than it actually was (which made poor old Mr
Denker in need of a seeing-eye dog, Dussander thought dryly), because that
explained all the reading the boy had supposedly been doing.
Dussander had been very careful about that, and he thought there had
been no
slips.
He was dressed in his best suit, and although the evening was damp, his
arthritis had been remarkably mellow -nothing but an occasional twinge.
For some absurd reason the boy had wanted him to leave his umbrella
home, but Dussander had insisted. All in all, he had had a pleasant and
rather exciting evening. Dreadful cognac or no, he had not been out to
dinner in nine years.
During the meal he had discussed the Essen Motor Works, the rebuilding
of postwar Germany-Bowden had asked several intelligent questions about
that, and had seemed impressed by Dussander's answers-and German
writers. Monica Bowden had asked him how he had happened to come to
America so late in life and Dussander, adopting the proper expression of
myopic sorrow, had explained about the death of his fictitious wife.
Monica Bowden was meltingly sympathetic.
And now, over the absurd cognac, Dick Bowden said: 'If this is too
personal, Mr Denker, please don't answer but I couldn't help wondering
what you did in the war.'
The boy stiffened ever so slightly.
Dussander smiled and felt for his cigarettes. He could see them perfectly
well, but it was important to make not the tiniest slip. Monica put them in
his hand.
Thank you, dear lady. The meal was superb. You are a fine cook. My own
wife never did better.'
Monica thanked him and looked flustered. Todd gave her an irritated
look.
'Not personal at all,' Dussander said, lighting his cigarette and turning to
Bowden. 'I was in the reserves from 1943 on, as were all able-bodied men
too old to be in the active services. By then the handwriting was on the wall
for the Third Reich, and for the madmen who created it. One madman in
particular, of course.'
He blew out his match and looked solemn.
'There was great relief when the tide turned against Hitler. Great relief.
Of course,' and here he looked at Bowden disarmingly, as man to man, 'one
was careful not to express such a sentiment. Not aloud.'
'I suppose not,' Dick Bowden said respectfully.
'No,' Dussander said gravely. 'Not aloud. I remember one evening when
four or five of us, all friends, stopped at a local ratskeller after work for a
drink-by then there was not always schnapps, or even beer, but it so
happened that night there were both. We had all known each other for
upwards of twenty years. One of our number, Hans Hassler, mentioned in
passing that perhaps the Fuehrer had been ill-advised to open a second front
against the Russians. I said, "Hans, God in Heaven, watch what you say!"
Poor Hans went pale and changed the subject entirely. Yet three days later
he was gone. I never saw him again, nor, as far as I know, did anyone else
who was sitting at our table that night.'
'How awful!' Monica said breathlessly. 'More cognac, Mr Denker?'
'No thank you,' he smiled at her. 'My wife had a saying from her mother:
"One must never overdo the sublime."'
Todd's small, troubled frown deepened slightly.
'Do you think he was sent to one of the camps?' Dick asked. 'Your friend
Hessler?'
'Hassler,' Dussander corrected gently. He grew grave. 'Many were. The
camps they will be the shame of the German people for a thousand years
to come. They are Hitler's real legacy.'
'Oh, I think that's too harsh,' Bowden said, lighting his pipe and puffing
out a choking cloud of Cherry Blend. 'According to what I've read, the
majority of the German people had no idea of what was going on. The
locals around Auschwitz thought it was a sausage plant.'
'Ugh, how terrible,' Monica said, and pulled a grimacing that's-enough-
of-that expression at her husband. Then she turned to Dussander and
smiled. 'I just love the smell of a pipe, Mr. Denker, don't you?'
'Indeed I do, madam,' Dussander said. He had just gotten an almost
insurmountable urge to sneeze under control.
Bowden suddenly reached across the table and clapped his son on the
shoulder. Todd jumped. 'You're awfully quiet tonight, son. Feeling all right?'
Todd offered a peculiar smile that seemed divided between his father and
Dussander. 'I feel okay. I've heard most of these stories before, remember.'
'Todd!' Monica said. That's hardly -'
'The boy is only being honest,' Dussander said. 'A privilege of boys
which men often have to give up. Yes, Mr Bowden?'
Dick laughed and nodded.
'Perhaps I could get Todd to walk back to my house with me now,'
Dussander said. 'I'm sure he has his studies.'
'Todd is a very apt pupil,' Monica said, but she spoke almost
automatically, looking at Todd in a puzzled sort of way. 'All As and Bs,
usually. He got a C in this last quarter, but he's promised to bring his French
up to snuff on his March report. Right, Todd-baby?'
Todd offered the peculiar smile again and nodded.: 'No need for you to
walk,' Dick said. 'I'll be glad to run you back to your place.'
'I walk for the air and the exercise,' Dussander said. 'Really, I must
insist unless Todd prefers not to.'
'Oh, no, I'd like a walk,' Todd said, and his mother and father beamed at
him.
They were almost to Dussander's corner when Dussander broke the
silence. It was drizzling, and he hoisted his umbrella over both of them.
And yet still his arthritis lay quiet, dozing. It was amazing.
'You are like my arthritis,' he said.
Todd's head came up. 'Huh?'
'Neither of you have had much to say tonight. What's got your tongue,
boy? Cat or cormorant?'
'Nothing,' Todd muttered. They turned down Dussander's street.
'Perhaps I could guess,' Dussander said, not without a touch of malice.
'When you came to get me, you were afraid I might make a slip "let the
cat out of the bag," you say here.
Yet you were determined to go through with the dinner because you had
run out of excuses to put your parents off. Now you are disconcerted that all
went well. Is that not the truth?'
'Who cares?' Todd said, and shrugged sullenly.
'Why shouldn't it go well?' Dussander demanded. 'I was dissembling
before you were born. You keep a secret well enough, I give you that. I give
it to you most graciously. But did you see me tonight? I charmed them.
Charmed them!'
Todd suddenly burst out: 'You didn't have to do that!'
Dussander came to a complete stop, staring at Todd.
'Not do it? Not? I thought that was what you wanted, boy! Certainly they
will offer no objections if you continue to come over and "read" to me.'
'You're sure taking a lot for granted!' Todd said hotly. 'Maybe I've got all I
want from you. Do you think there's anybody forcing me to come over to
your scuzzy house and watch you slop up booze like those old wino
pushbags that hang around the old trainyards? Is that what you think?' His
voice had risen and taken on a thin, wavering, hysterical note. 'Because
there's nobody forcing me. If I want to come, I'll come, and if I don't, I
won't.'
'Lower your voice. People will hear.'
'Who cares?' Todd said, but he began to walk again. This time he
deliberately walked outside the umbrella's span.
'No, nobody forces you to come,' Dussander said. And then he took a
calculated shot in the dark: 'In fact, you are welcome to stay away. Believe
me, boy, I have no scruples about drinking alone. None at all.'
Todd looked at him scornfully. 'You'd like that, wouldn't you?'
Dussander only smiled noncommitally.
'Well, don't count on it.' They had reached the concrete walk leading up
to Dussander's stoop. Dussander fumbled in his pocket for his latchkey. The
arthritis flared a dim red in the joints of his fingers and then subsided,
waiting. Now Dussander thought he understood what it was waiting for: for
him to be alone again. Then it could come out.
'I'll tell you something,' Todd said. He sounded oddly breathless. 'If they
knew what you were, if I ever told them, they'd spit on you and then kick
you out on your skinny old ass.
My mom might even take a butcher's knife to you. Her mother was part
Jewish, she told me once.'
Dussander looked at Todd closely in the drizzling dark. The boy's face
was turned defiantly up to his, but the skin was pallid, the sockets under the
eyes dark and slightly hollowed-the skin-tones of someone who has
brooded long while others are asleep.
'I am sure they would have nothing but revulsion for me,' Dussander said,
although he privately thought that the elder Bowden might stay his
revulsion to ask many of the questions his son had asked already. 'Nothing
but revulsion. But what would they feel for you, boy, when I told them you
had known about me for eight months and said nothing?'
Todd stared at him wordlessly in the dark. 'Come and see me if you
please,' Dussander said indifferently, 'and stay home if you don't.
Goodnight, boy.'
He went up the walk to his front door, leaving Todd standing in the
drizzle and looking after him with his mouth slightly ajar.
The next morning at breakfast, Monica said, 'Your dad liked Mr Denker a
lot, Todd. He said he reminded him of your grandfather.'
Todd muttered something unintelligible around his toast. Monica looked
at her son and wondered if he had been sleeping well. He looked pale. And
his grades had taken that inexplicable dip. Todd never got Cs.
'You feeling okay these days, Todd?'
He looked at her blankly for a moment, and then that radiant smile spread
over his face, charming her comforting her. There was a dab of strawberry
preserve on his chin.
'Sure,' he said. 'Four-oh.'
'Todd-baby,' she said.
'Monica-baby,' he responded, and they both started to laugh.
9
March, 1975.
'Kitty-kitty,' Dussander said. 'Heeere, kitty-kitty. Puss-puss? Puss-puss?'
He was sitting on his back stoop, a pink plastic bowl by his right foot.
The bowl was full of milk. It was 1:30 in the afternoon; the day was hazy
and hot. Brush-fires far to the west tinged the air with an autumnal smell
that jagged oddly against the calendar. If the boy was coming, he would be
here in another hour. But the boy didn't always come now.
Instead of seven days a week he came sometimes only four times, or five.
An intuition had grown in him, little by little, and his intuition told him that
the boy was having troubles of his own.
'Kitty-kitty,' Dussander coaxed. The stray cat was at the far end of the
yard, sitting in the ragged verge of weeds by Dussander's fence. It was a
torn, and every bit as ragged as the weeds it sat in. Every time he spoke, the
cat's ears cocked forward. Its eyes never left the pink bowl filled with milk.
Perhaps, Dussander thought, the boy was having troubles with his
studies. Or bad dreams. Or both.
The last made him smile.
'Kitty-kitty,' he called softly. The cat's ears cocked forward again. It didn't
move, not yet, but it continued to study the milk.
Dussander had certainly been afflicted with problems of his own. For
three weeks or so he had worn the SS uniform to bed like grotesque
pyjamas, and the uniform had warded off the insomnia and the bad dreams.
His sleep had been-at first-as sound as a lumberjack's. Then the dreams had
returned, not little by little, but all at once, and worse than ever before.
Dreams of running as well as the dreams of the eyes. Running through a
wet, unseen jungle where heavy leaves and damp fronds struck his face,
leaving trickles that felt like sap or blood. Running and running, the
luminous eyes always around him, peering soullessly at him, until he broke
into a clearing. In the darkness he sensed rather than saw the steep rise that
began on the clearing's far side. At the top of that rise was Patin, its low
cement buildings and yards surrounded by barbed wire and electrified wire,
its sentry towers standing like Martian dreadnoughts straight out of War of
the Worlds. And in the middle, huge stacks billowed smoke against the sky,
and below these brick columns were the furnaces, stoked and ready to go,
glowing in the night like the eyes of fierce demons. They had
told the inhabitants of the area that the Patin inmates made clothes and
candles, and of course the locals had believed that no more than the locals
around Auschwitz had believed that the camp was a sausage factory. It
didn't matter. Looking back over his shoulder in the dream, he would at last
see them coming out of hiding, the restless dead, the Juden, shambling
towards him with blue numbers glaring from the livid flesh of their
outstretched arms, their hands hooked into talons, their faces no longer
expressionless but animated with hate, lively with vengeance, vivacious
with murder. Toddlers ran beside their mothers and grandfathers were borne
up by their middle-aged children. And the dominant expression on all their
faces was desperation. Desperation? Yes. Because in the dreams he knew
(and so did they) that if he could climb the hill, he would be safe. Down
here in these wet and swampy lowlands, in this jungle where the night-
flowering plants extruded blood instead of sap, he was a hunted animal
prey. But up there, he was in command. If this was a jungle, then the camp
at the top of the hill was a zoo, all the wild animals safely in cages, he the
head keeper whose job it was to decide which would be fed, which would
live, which would be handed over to the vivisectionists, which would be
taken to the knacker's in the remover's van. He would begin to run up the
hill, running in all the slowness of nightmare. He would feel the first
skeletal hands close about his neck, feel their cold and stinking breath,
smell their decay, hear their birdlike cries of triumph as they pulled him
down with salvation not only in sight but almost at hand-'Kitty-kitty,'
Dussander called. 'Milk. Nice milk.'
The cat came at last. It crossed half of the back yard and then sat again,
but lightly, its tail twitching with worry. It didn't trust him; no. But
Dussander knew the cat could smell the milk and so he was sanguine.
Sooner or later it would come.
At Patin there had never been a contraband problem. Some of the
prisoners came in with their valuables poked far up their asses in small
chamois bags (and how often their valuables turned out not to be valuable at
all-photographs, locks of hair, fake jewellery), often pushed up with sticks
until they were past the point where even the long fingers of the trustee they
had called Stinky-Thumbs could reach. One woman, he remembered, had
had a small diamond, flawed, it turned out, really not valuable at all-but it
had been in her family for six generations, passed from mother to eldest
daughter (or so she said, but of course she was a Jew and all of them lied).
She swallowed it before entering Patin. When it came out in her waste, she
swallowed it again. She kept doing this, although eventually the diamond
began to cut her insides and she bled.
There had been other ruses, although most only involved petty items such
as a hoard of tobacco or a hair-ribbon or two. It didn't matter. In the room
Dussander used for prisoner interrogations there was a hotplate and a
homely kitchen table covered with a red checked cloth much like the one in
his own kitchen. There was always a pot of lamb stew bubbling mellowly
away on that hotplate. When contraband was suspected (and when was it
not) a member of the suspected clique would be brought to that room.
Dussander would stand them by the hotplate, where the rich fumes from the
stew wafted. Gently, he would ask them Who. Who is hiding gold? Who is
hiding jewellery? Who has tobacco?
Who gave the Givenet woman the pill for her baby? Who? The stew was
never specifically promised; but always the aroma eventually loosened their
tongues. Of course, a truncheon would have done the same, or a gun-barrel
jammed into their filthy crotches, but the stew was was elegant. Yes.
'Kitty-kitty,' Dussander called. The cat's ears cocked forward. It half-rose,
than half-remembered some long-ago kick, or perhaps a match that had
burned its whiskers, and it settled back on its haunches. But soon it would
move.
He had found a way of propitiating his nightmare. It was, in a way, no
more than wearing the SS uniform but raised to a greater power.
Dussander was pleased with himself, only sorry that he had never thought
of it before. He supposed he had the boy to thank for this new method of
quieting himself, for showing him that the key to the past's terrors was not
in rejection but in contemplation and even something like a friend's
embrace. It was true that before the boy's unexpected arrival last summer he
hadn't had any bad dreams for a long time, but he believed now that he had
come to a coward's terms with his past. He had been forced to give up a part
of himself. Now he had reclaimed it. 'Kitty-kitty,' called Dussander, and a
smile broke on his face, a kindly smile, a reassuring smile, the smile of all
old men who have somehow come through the cruel courses of life to a safe
place, still relatively intact, and with at least some wisdom. The tom rose
from its haunches, hesitated only a moment, longer, and then trotted across
the remainder of the back yard with lithe grace. It mounted the steps, gave
Dussander a final mistrustful look, laying back its chewed and scabby ears;
then it began to drink the milk.
'Nice milk,' Dussander said, pulling on the Playtex rubber gloves that had
lain in his lap all the while. 'Nice milk for a nice kitty.' He had bought these
gloves in the supermarket. He had stood in the express lane, and older
women had looked at him approvingly, even speculatively. The gloves were
advertised on TV. They had cuffs. They were so flexible you could pick up
a dime while you were wearing them.
He stroked the cat's back with one green finger and talked to it
soothingly. Its back began to arch with the rhythm of his strokes. Just before
the bowl was empty, he seized the cat. It came electrically alive in his
clenching hands, twisting and jerking, clawing at the rubber. Its body lashed
limberly back and forth, and Dussander had no doubt that if its teeth or
claws got into him, it would come off the winner. It was an old campaigner.
It takes one to know one, Dussander thought, grinning.
Holding the cat prudently away from his body, the painful grin stamped
on his face, Dussander pushed the back door open with his foot and went
into the kitchen. The cat yowled and twisted and ripped at the rubber
gloves. Its feral, triangular head flashed down and fastened on one green
thumb. 'Nasty kitty,' Dussander said reproachfully.
The oven door stood open. Dussander threw the cat inside. Its claws
made a ripping, prickly sound as they disengaged from the gloves.
Dussander slammed the oven door shut with one knee, provoking a painful
twinge from his arthritis. Yet he continued to grin. Breathing hard, nearly
panting, he propped himself against the stove for a moment, his head
hanging down. It was a gas stove. He rarely used it for anything fancier
than TV dinners, and now, killing stray cats. Faintly, rising up through the
gas burners, he could hear the cat scratching and yowling to be let out.
Dussander twisted the oven dial over to 500. There was an audible pop!
as the oven pilot light lit two double rows of hissing gas. The cat stopped
yowling and began to scream. It sounded yes almost like a young boy. A
young boy in terrible pain. The thought made Dussander smile even more
broadly. His heart thundered in his chest. The cat scratched and whirled
madly in the oven, still screaming. Soon, a hot, furry, burning smell began
to seep out of the oven and into the room.
He scraped the remains of the cat out of the oven half an hour later, using
a barbecue fork he had acquired for two dollars and ninety-eight cents at the
Grant's in the shopping center a mile away.
The cat's roasted carcass went into an empty flour sack. He took the sack
down to the cellar. The cellar floor had never been cemented. Shortly,
Dussander came back up. He sprayed the kitchen with Glade until it reeked
of artificial pine scent. He opened all the windows. He washed the barbecue
fork and hung it up on the pegboard. Then he sat down to wait and see if the
boy would come. He smiled and smiled.
Todd did come, about five minutes after Dussander had given up on him
for the afternoon. He was wearing a warmup jacket with his school colours
on it; he was also wearing a San Diego Padres baseball cap. He carried his
schoolbooks under his arm.
'Yucka-ducka,' he said, coming into the kitchen and wrinkling his nose.
'What's that smell? It's awful.'
'I tried the oven,' Dussander said, lighting a cigarette. 'I'm afraid I burned
my supper. I had to throw it out.'
One day late in the month the boy came much earlier than usual, long
before school usually let out. Dussander was sitting in the kitchen, drinking
Ancient Age bourbon from a chipped and discoloured cup that had the
words HERE'S YER CAWFEE MAW, HAW! HAW! HAW! written around
the rim. He had his rocker out in the kitchen now and he was just drinking
and rocking, rocking and drinking, bumping his slippers on the faded
linoleum. He was pleasantly high. There had been no more bad dreams at
all until just last night. Not since the tomcat with the chewed ears. Last
night's had been particularly horrible, though. That could not be denied.
They had dragged him down after he had gotten halfway up the hill, and
they had begun to do unspeakable things to him before he was able to wake
himself up. Yet, after his initial thrashing return to the world of real things,
he had been confident. He could end the dreams whenever he wished.
Perhaps a cat would not be enough this time. But there was always the
dog pound. Yes.
Always the pound.
Todd came abruptly into the kitchen, his face pale and shiny and strained.
He had lost weight, all right, Dussander thought And there was a queer
white look in his eyes that Dussander did not like at all.
'You're going to help me,' Todd said suddenly and defiantly.
'Really?' Dussander said mildly, but sudden apprehension leaped inside
of him. He didn't let his face change as Todd slammed his books down on
the table with a sudden, vicious overhand stroke. One of them spun-skated
across the oilcloth and landed in a tent on the floor by Dussander's foot.
'Yes, you're fucking-A right!' Todd said shrilly. 'You better believe it!
Because this is your fault! All your fault!' Hectic spots of red mounted into
his cheeks. 'But you're going to have to help me get out of it, because I've
got the goods on you! I've got you right where I want you-'
'I'll help you in any way I can,' Dussander said quietly. He saw that he
had folded his hands neatly in front of himself without even thinking about
it-just as he had once done. He leaned forward in the rocker until his chin
was directly over his folded hands-as he had once done. His face was calm
and friendly and inquiring; none of his growing apprehension showed.
Sitting just so, he could almost imagine a pot of lamb stew simmering on
the stove behind him. 'Tell me what the trouble is.'
'This is the fucking trouble,' Todd said viciously, and threw a folder at
Dussander. It bounced off his chest and landed in his lap, and he was
momentarily surprised by the heat of the anger which leaped up in him; the
urge to rise and
backhand the boy smartly. Instead, he kept the mild expression on his
face. It was the boy's school-card, he saw, although the school seemed to be
at ridiculous pains to hide the fact. Instead of a school-card, or a Grade
Report, it was called a 'Quarterly Progess Report'. He grunted at that, and
opened the card.
A typed half-sheet of paper fell out. Dussander put it aside for later
examination and turned his attention to the boy's grades first.
'You seem to have fallen on the rocks, my boy,' Dussander said, not
without some pleasure. The boy had passed only English and American
History. Every other grade was an F.
'It's not my fault,' Todd hissed venomously. 'It's your fault. All those
stories. I have nightmares about them, do you know that? I sit down and
open my books and I start thinking about whatever you told me that day and
the next thing I know, my mother's telling me it's time to go to bed. Well,
that's not my fault! It isn't! You hear me? It isn't!'
'I hear you very well,' Dussander said, and read the typed note that had
been tucked into Todd's card.
Dear Mr and Mrs Bowden,
This note is to suggest that we have a group conference concerning
Todd's second- and third-quarter grades. In light of Todd's previous good
work in this school, his current grades suggest a specific problem which
may be affecting his academic performance in a deleterious way. Such a
problem can often be solved by a frank and open discussion. I should point
out that although Todd has passed the half-year, his final grades may be
failing in some cases unless his work improves radically in the fourth
quarter. Failing grades would entail summer school to avoid being kept
back and causing a major scheduling problem.
I must also note that Toad is in the college division, and that his work so
far this year is far below college acceptance levels. It is also below the level
of academic ability assumed by the SAT tests.
Please be assured that I am ready to work out a mutually convenient time
for us to meet. In a case such as this, earlier is usually better.
Sincerely yours,
Edward French
'Who is this Edward French?' Dussander asked, slipping the note back
inside the card (part of him still marvelled at the American love of jargon;
such a rolling missive to inform the parents that their son was flunking out!)
and then refolding his hands. His premonition of disaster was stronger than
ever, but he refused to give in to it. A year before, he would have done; a
year ago he had been ready for disaster. Now he was not, but it seemed that
the cursed boy had brought it to him anyway. 'Is he your headmaster?'
'Rubber Ed? Hell, no. He's the guidance counsellor.'
'Guidance counsellor? What is that?'
'You can figure it out,' Todd said. He was nearly hysterical. 'You read the
goddam note!'
He walked rapidly around the room, shooting sharp, quick glances at
Dussander. 'Well, I'm not going to let any of this shit go down. I'm just not.
I'm not going to any summer school. My dad and mom are going to Hawaii
this summer and
I'm going with them.' He pointed at the card on the table. 'Do you know
what my dad will do if he sees that?'
Dussander shook his head.
'He'll get everything out of me. Everything. He'll know it was you. It
couldn't be anything else, because nothing else has changed. He'll poke and
pry and hell get it all out of me.
And then then I'll I'll be in Dutch.'
He stared at Dussander resentfully.
'They'll watch me. Hell, they might make me see a doctor, I don't know.
How should I know? But I'm not getting in Dutch. And I'm not going to any
fucking summer school.'
'Or to the reformatory,' Dussander said. He said it very quietly.
Todd stopped circling the room. His face became very still. His cheeks
and forehead, already pale, became even whiter. He stared at Dussander,
and had to try twice before he could speak. 'What? What did you just say?'
'My dear boy,' Dussander said, assuming an air of great patience, 'for the
last five minutes I have listened to you pule and whine, and what all your
puling and whining comes down to is this. You are in trouble. You might be
found out. You might find yourself in adverse circumstances.' Seeing that
he had the boy's complete attention-at last -Dussander sipped reflectively
from his cup.
'My boy,' he went on, 'that is a very dangerous attitude for you to have.
And dangerous for me. The potential harm is much greater for me. You
worry about your school-card.
Pah! This for your school-card.'
He flicked it off the table and onto the floor with one yellow finger.
'I am worried about my life!'
Todd did not reply; he simply went on looking at Dussander with that
white-eyed, slightly crazed stare.
'The Israelis will not scruple at the fact that I am seventy -six. The death
penalty is still very much in favour over there, you know, especially when
the man in the dock is a Nazi war criminal associated with the camps.'
'You're a US citizen,' Todd said. 'America wouldn't let them take you. I
read up on that. I -'
'You read, but you don't listen! I am not a US citizen! My papers came
from la cosa nostra. I would be deported, and Mossad agents would be
waiting for me wherever I deplaned.'
'I wish they would hang you,' Todd muttered, curling his hands into his
fists and staring down at them. 'I was crazy to get mixed up with you in the
first place.'
'No doubt,' Dussander said, and smiled thinly. 'But you are mixed up with
me. We must live in the present, boy, not in the past of "I-should-have-
nevers". You must realize that your fate and my own are now inextricably
entwined. If you "blow the horn on me", as your saying goes, do you think I
will hesitate to blow the horn on you? Seven hundred thousand died at
Patin. To the world at large I am a criminal, a monster, even the butcher
your scandal-rags would have me. You are an accessory to all of that, my
boy. You have criminal knowledge of an illegal alien, but you have not
reported it. And if I am caught, I will tell the world all about you. When the
reporters put their microphones in my face, it will be your name I'll repeat
over and over again. "Todd Bowden, yes, that is his name how long?
Almost a year. He wanted to know everything all the gooshy parts. That's
how he put it, yes: 'All the gooshy parts'."
Todd's breath had stopped. His skin appeared transparent. Dussander
smiled at him. He sipped bourbon.
'I think they will put you in jail. They may call it a reformatory, or a
correctional facility -there may be a fancy name for it, like this "Quarterly
Progress Report" -' his lip curled '-but no matter what they call it, there will
be bars on the windows.' Todd wet his lips. 'I'd call you a liar. I'd tell them I
just found out. They'd believe me, not you. You just better remember that.'
Dussander's thin smile remained. 'I thought you told me your father
would get it all out of you.'
Todd spoke slowly, as a person speaks when realization and verbalization
occur simultaneously. 'Maybe not. Maybe not this time. This isn't just
breaking a window with a rock.'
Dussander winced inwardly. He suspected that the boy's judgement was
right-with so much at stake, he might indeed be able to convince his father.
After all, when faced with such an unpleasant truth, what parent would not
want to be convinced? 'Perhaps. Perhaps not. But how are you going to
explain all those books you had to read to me because poor Mr Denker is
half blind? My eyes are not what they were, but I can still read fine print
with my spectacles. I can prove it.'
'I'd say you fooled me!'
'Will you? And what reason will you be able to give for my fooling?'
'For for friendship. Because you were lonely.'
That, Dussander reflected, was just close enough to the truth to be
believable. And once, in the beginning, the boy might have been able to
bring it off. But now he was ragged; now he was coming apart in strings
like a coat that has reached the end of its useful service. If a child shot off
his cap pistol across the street, this boy would jump into the air and scream
like a girl.
'Your school-card will also support my side of it,' Dussander said. 'It was
not Robinson Crusoe that caused your grades to fall down so badly, my boy,
was it?'
'Shut up, why don't you? Just shut up about it!'
'No,' Dussander said. 'I won't shut up about it.' He lit a cigarette,
scratching the wooden match alight on the gas oven door. 'Not until I make
you see the simple truth. We are in this together, sink or swim.' He looked at
Todd through the raftering smoke, not smiling, his old, lined face reptilian.
'I will drag you down, boy. I promise you that. If anything comes out,
everything will come out. That is my promise to you.' Todd stared at him
sullenly and didn't reply.
'Now,' Dussander said briskly, with the air of a man who has put a
necessary unpleasantness behind him, 'the question is, what are we going to
do about this situation? Have you any ideas?'
'This will fix the report card,' Todd said, and took a new bottle of ink
eradicator from his jacket pocket. 'About that fucking letter, I don't know.'
Dussander looked at the ink eradicator approvingly. He had falsified a few
reports of his own in his time. When the quotas had gone up to the point of
fantasy and far, far beyond. And-more like the situation they were now in-
there had been the matter of the invoices those which enumerated the
spoils of war. Each week he would check the boxes of valuables, all of them
to be sent back to Berlin in special train-cars that were like big Padd safes
on wheels. On the side of each box was a manilla envelope, and inside the
envelope there had been a verified invoice of that box's contents. So many
rings, necklaces, chokers, so many grams of gold. Dussander, however, had
had his own box of valuables-not very valuable valuables, but not
insignificant, either. Jades. Tourmalines.
Opals. A few flawed pearls. Industrial diamonds. And when he saw an
item invoiced for Berlin that caught his eye or seemed a good investment,
he would remove it, replace it with an item from his own box, and use ink
eradicator on the invoice, changing their item for his. He had developed
into a fairly expert forger a talent that had come in handy more than once
after the war was over.
'Good,' he told Todd. 'As for this other matter'
Dussander began to rock again, sipping from his cup. Todd pulled a chair
up to the table and began to go to work on his report-card, which he had
picked up from the floor without a word. Dussander's outward calm had had
its effect on him and now he worked silently, his head bent studiously over
the card, like any American boy who has set out to do the best by God job
he can, whether that job be planting corn, pitching a no-hitter in the Little
League World Series, or forging grades on his report-card.
Dussander looked at the nape of his neck, lightly tanned and cleanly
exposed between the fall of his hair and the round neck of his tee-shirt. His
eyes drifted from there to the top counter drawer where he kept the butcher
knives. One quick thrust-he knew where to put it-and the boy's spinal cord
would be severed. His lips would be sealed forever.
Dussander smiled regretfully. There would be questions asked if the boy
disappeared.
Too many of them. Some directed at him. Even if there was no letter with
a friend, close scrutiny was something he could not afford. Too bad.
'This man French,' he said, tapping the letter. 'Does he know your parents
in a social way?'
'Him?' Todd edged the word with contempt. 'My mom and dad don't go
anywhere that he could even get in.'
'Has he ever met them in his professional capacity? Has he ever had
conferences with them before?'
'No. I've always been near the top of my classes. Until now.'
'So what does he know about them?' Dussander said, looking dreamily
into his cup, which was now nearly empty. 'Oh, he knows about you. He no
doubt has all the records on you that he can use. Back to the fights you had
in the kindergarten play yard. But what does he know about them?'
Todd put his pen and the small bottle of ink eradicator away. 'Well, he
knows their names. Of course. And their ages. He knows we're all
Methodists. We don't go much, but he'd know that's what we are, because
it's on the forms. He must know what my dad does for a living; that's on the
forms, too. All that stuff they have to fill out every year. And I'm pretty sure
that's all.'
'Would he know if your parents were having troubles at home?'
'What's that supposed to mean?'
Dussander tossed off the last of the bourbon in his cup. 'Squabbles.
Fights. Your father sleeping on the couch. Your mother drinking too much.'
His eyes gleamed. 'A divorce brewing.'
Indignantly, Todd said, "There's nothing like that going on! No way!'
'I never said there was. But just think, boy. Suppose that things at your
house were "going to hell in a streetcar", as the saying is.'
Todd only looked at him, frowning.
'You would be worried about them,' Dussander said. 'Very worried. You
would lose your appetite. You would sleep poorly. Saddest of all, your
schoolwork would suffer. True? Very sad for the children, when there are
troubles in the home.'
Understanding dawned in the boy's eyes-understanding and something
like dumb gratitude. Dussander was gratified.
'Yes, it is an unhappy situation when a family totters on the edge of
destruction,'
Dussander said grandly, pouring more bourbon. He was getting quite
drunk. 'The daytime television dramas, they make this absolutely clear.
There is acrimony. Backbiting and lies. Most of all, there is pain. Pain, my
boy. You have no idea of the hell your parents are going through. They are
so swallowed up by their own troubles that they have little time for the
problems of their own son. His problems seem minor compared to theirs,
hein?
Someday, when the scars have begun to heal, they will no doubt take a
fuller interest in him once again. But now the only concession they can
make is to send the boy's kindly grandfather to Mr. French.'
Todd's eyes had been gradually brightening to a glow that was nearly
fervid. 'Might work,' he was muttering. 'Might, yeah, might work, might -'
He broke off suddenly. His eyes darkened again. 'No, it won't You don't
look like me, not even a little bit. Rubber Ed will never believe it.'
'Himmel! Got im Himmel!' Dussander cried, getting to his feet, crossing
the kitchen (a bit unsteadily), opening one of the cupboards, and pulling
down his bottle of Ancient Age.
He spun off the cap and poured liberally. 'For a smart boy, you are such a
Dummkop. When do grandfathers ever look like their grandsons? Huh? I
am bald.' He pronounced it balt. 'Are you bald?'
Approaching the table again, he reached out with surprising quickness,
snatched an abundant handful of Todd's blond hair, and pulled briskly.
'Cut it out!' Todd snapped, but he smiled a little.
'Besides,' Dussander said, settling back into his rocker, 'you have blond
hair and blue eyes. My eyes are blue, and before my hair turned white and
fell out, it was blond. You can tell me your whole family history. Your aunts
and uncles. The people your father works with. Your mother's little hobbies.
I will remember. I will study and remember.
Two days later it will all be forgotten again-these days my memory is like
a cloth bag filled with water-but I will remember for long enough.' He
smiled grimly. 'In my time I have stayed ahead of Wiesenthal and pulled the
wool over the eyes of Himmler himself. If I cannot fool one American
public school teacher, I will pull my winding shroud around me and crawl
down into my grave.'
'Maybe,' Todd said slowly, and Dussander could see he had already
accepted it. His eyes were luminous with relief.
'There is another resemblance,' Dussander said.
'There is?'
'You said your mother was one-eighth a Jew. My mother was all Jewish.
We are both kikes, my boy. We are two mockies sitting in the kitchen, just
like in the old joke.' He suddenly grabbed his nose between the thumb and
index finger of his right hand. At the same time he reached over the table
and grabbed the boy's nose with his left hand. 'And it shows!' he roared. 'It
shows!'
He began to cackle with laughter, the rocking chair squeaking back and
forth. Todd looked at him, puzzled and a little frightened, but after a bit he
began to laugh, too. In Dussander's kitchen they laughed and laughed,
Dussander by the open window where the warm California breeze wafted
in, and Todd rocked back on the rear legs of his kitchen chair, so that its
back rested against the oven door, the white enamel of
which was crisscrossed by the dark, charred-looking streaks made by
Dussander's wooden matches as he struck them alight.
Rubber Ed French (his nickname, Todd had explained to Dussander,
referred to the rubbers he always wore over his sneakers during wet
weather) was a slight man who made an affectation of always wearing Keds
to school. It was a touch of informality which he thought would endear him
to the one hundred and six children between the ages of twelve and fourteen
who made up his counselling load. He had five pairs of Keds, ranging in
colour from Fast Track Blue to Screaming Yellow Zonkers, totally unaware
that behind his back he was known not only as Rubber Ed but as Sneaker
Pete and The Ked Man, as in The Ked Man Cometh. He had been known as
Pucker in college, and he would have been most humiliated of all to learn
that even that shameful fact had somehow gotten out.
He rarely wore ties, preferring turtle-neck sweaters. He had been wearing
these ever since the early sixties, when David McCallum had popularized
them in The Man from U. N. C. L. E. In his college days his classmates had
been known to spy him crossing the quad and remark, 'Here comes Pucker
in his U. N. C. L. E. sweater.' He had majored in Education Psychology, and
he privately considered himself to be the only good guidance counsellor he
had ever met. He had real rapport with his kids. He could get right down to
it with them; he could rap with them and be silently sympathetic if they had
to do some shouting and kick out the jams. He could get into their hangups
because he understood what a bummer it was to be thirteen when someone
was doing a number on your head and you couldn't get your shit together.
The thing was, he had a damned hard time remembering what it had been
like to be thirteen himself. He supposed that was the ultimate price you had
to pay for growing up in the fifties. That, and entering the brave new world
of the sixties nicknamed Pucker. Now, as Todd Bowden's grandfather came
into his office, closing the pebbled-glass door firmly behind him, Rubber
Ed stood up respectfully but was careful not to come around his desk to
greet the old man. He was aware of his sneakers. Sometimes the old-timers
didn't understand that the sneakers were a psychological aid with kids who
had teacher hangups-which was to say that some of the older folks couldn't
get behind a guidance counsellor in Keds.
This is one fine-looking dude, Rubber Ed thought. His white hair was
carefully brushed back. His three-piece suit was spotlessly clean. His dove-
grey tie was impeccably knotted. In his left hand he held a furled black
umbrella (outside, a light drizzle had been falling since the weekend) in a
manner that was almost military. A few years ago Rubber Ed and his wife
had gone on a Dorothy Sayers jag, reading everything by that estimable
lady that they could lay their hands upon. It occurred to him now that this
was her brainchild, Lord Peter Wimsey, to the life. It was Wimsey at
seventy-five, years after both Hunter and Harriet Vane had passed on to
their rewards. He made a mental note to tell Sondra about this when he got
home. 'Mr Bowden,' he said respectfully, and offered his hand.
'A pleasure,' Bowden said, and shook it Rubber Ed was careful not to put
on the firm and uncompromising pressure he applied to the hands of the
fathers he saw; it was obvious from the gingerly way the old boy offered it
that he had arthritis. 'A pleasure, Mr French,' Bowden repeated, and took a
seat, carefully pulling up the knees of his trousers. He propped the umbrella
between his feet and leaned on it, looking like an elderly, extremely urbane
vulture that had come in to roost in Rubber Ed French's office. He had the
slightest touch of an accent, Rubber Ed thought, but it wasn't the clipped
intonation of the British upper class, as Wimsey's would have been;
it was broader, more European. Anyway, the resemblance to Todd was
quite striking. Especially through the nose and eyes.
I'm glad you could come,' Rubber Ed told him, resuming his own seat,
'although in these cases the student's mother or father-'
This was the opening gambit, of course. Almost ten years of experience
in the counselling business had convinced him that when an aunt or an
uncle or a grandparent showed up for a conference, it usually meant trouble
at home-the sort of trouble that invariably turned out to be the root of the
problem. To Rubber Ed, this came as a relief. Domestic problems were bad,
but for a boy of Todd's intelligence, a heavy drug trip would have been
much, much worse.
'Yes, of course,' Bowden said, managing to look both sorrowful and
angry at the same time. 'My son and his wife asked me if I could come and
talk this sorry business over with you, Mr French. Todd is a good boy,
believe me. This trouble with his school marks is only temporary.'
'Well, we all hope so, don't we, Mr Bowden? Smoke if you like. It's
supposed to be off-limits on school property, but I'll never tell.'
'Thank you.' Mr Bowden took a half-crushed package of Camel cigarettes
from his inner pocket, put one of the last two zigzagging smokes in his
mouth, found a Diamond Blue-Tip match, scratched it on the heel of one
black shoe, and lit up. He coughed an old man's dank cough over the first
drag, shook the match out, and put the blackened stump into the ashtray
Rubber Ed had produced. Rubber Ed watched this ritual, which seemed
almost as formal as the old man's shoes, with frank fascination.
'Where to begin,' Bowden said, his distressed face looking at Rubber Ed
through a swirling raft of cigarette smoke.
'Well,' Rubber Ed said kindly, 'the very fact that you're here instead of
Todd's parents tells me something, you know.'
'Yes, I suppose it does. Very well.' He folded his hands. The Camel
protruded from between the second and third fingers of his right. He
straightened his back and lifted his chin. There was something almost
Prussian in his mental coming to terms, Rubber Ed thought, something that
made him think of all those war movies he'd seen as a kid. 'My son and my
daughter-in-law are having troubles in their home,' Bowden said, biting off
each word precisely. 'Rather bad troubles, I should think.' His eyes, old but
amazingly bright, watched as Rubber Ed opened the folder centred in front
of him on the desk blotter. There were sheets of paper inside, but not many.
'And you feel that these troubles are affecting Todd's academic
performance?'
Bowden leaned forward perhaps six inches. His blue eyes never left
Rubber Ed's brown ones. There was a heavily charged pause, and then
Bowden said: 'The mother drinks.'
He resumed his former ramrod-straight position.
'Oh,' Rubber Ed said.
'Yes,' Bowden replied, nodding grimly. 'The boy has told me that he has
come home on two occasions and has found her sprawled out on the kitchen
table. He knows how my son feels about her drinking problem, and so the
boy has put dinner in the oven himself on these occasions, and has gotten
her to drink enough black coffee so she will at least be awake when Richard
comes home.'
'That's bad,' Rubber Ed said, although he had heard worse-mothers with
heroin habits, fathers who had abruptly taken it into their heads to start
banging their daughters or their sons. 'Has Mrs Bowden thought about
getting professional help for her problem?'
'The boy has tried to persuade her that would be the best course. She is
much ashamed, I think. If she was given a little time' He made a gesture
with his cigarette that left a dissolving smoke-ring in the air. 'You
understand?'
'Yes, of course,' Rubber Ed nodded, privately admiring the gesture that
had produced the smoke-ring. 'Your son Todd's father'
'He is not without blame,' Bowden said harshly. The hours he works, the
meals he has missed, the nights when he must leave suddenly I tell you,
Mr French, he is more married to his job than he is to Monica. I was raised
to believe that a man's family came before everything. Was it not the same
for you?'
'It sure was,' Rubber Ed responded heartily. His father had been a night
watchman for a large Los Angeles department store and he had really only
seen his pop on weekends and vacations.
'That is another side of the problem,' Bowden said.
Rubber Ed nodded and thought for a moment. 'What about your other
son, Mr Bowden? Uh' He looked down at the folder. 'Harold. Todd's
uncle.'
'Harry and Deborah are in Minnesota now,' Bowden said, quite truthfully.
'He has a position there at the University medical school. It would be quite
difficult for him to leave, and very unfair to ask him.' His face took on a
righteous cast. 'Harry and his wife are quite happily married.'
'I see.' Rubber Ed looked at the file again for a moment and then closed
it. 'Mr Bowden, I appreciate your frankness. I'll be just as frank with you.'
'Thank you,' Bowden said stiffly.
'We can't do as much for our students in the counselling area as we would
like. There are six counsellors here, and we're each carrying a load of over a
hundred students. My newest colleague, Hepburn, has a hundred and
fifteen. At this age, in our society, all children need help.'
'Of course.' Bowden mashed his cigarette brutally into the ashtray and
folded his hands once more.
'Sometimes bad problems get by us. Home environment and drugs are the
two most common. At least Todd isn't mixed up with speed or mescaline or
PCP.'
'God forbid.'
'Sometimes,' Rubber Ed went on, 'there's simply nothing we can do. It's
depressing, but it's a fact of life. Usually the ones that are first to get spit out
of the machine we're running here are the class troublemakers, the sullen,
uncommunicative kids, the ones who refuse to even try. They are simply
warm bodies waiting for the system to buck them up through the grades or
waiting to get old enough so they can quit without their parents' permission
and join the army or get a job at the Speedy-Boy Carwash or marry their
boyfriends. You understand? I'm being blunt. Our system is, as they say, not
all it's cracked up to be.'
'I appreciate your frankness.'
'But it hurts when you see the machine starting to mash up someone like
Todd. He ran out a 92 average for last year's work, and that puts him in the
ninety-fifth percentile. His English averages are even better. He shows a
flair for writing, and that's something special in a generation of kids that
thinks culture begins in front of the TV and ends in the neighbourhood
movie theatre. I was talking to the woman who had Todd in Comp last year.
She said Todd passed in the finest term-paper she'd seen in twenty years of
teaching. It was on the German death-camps during World War II. She gave
him the only A-plus she's ever given a composition student.'
'I have read it,' Bowden said. 'It is very fine.'
'He has also demonstrated above-average ability in the life sciences and
social sciences, and while he's not going to be one of the great math
whizzes of the century, all the notes I have indicate that he's given it the
good old college try until this year. Until this year. That's the whole story,
in a nutshell.'
'Yes.'
'I hate like hell to see Todd go down the tubes this way, Mr Bowden. And
summer school well, I said I'd be frank. Summer school often does a boy
like Todd more harm than good. Your usual junior high school summer
session is a zoo. All the monkeys and the laughing hyenas are in attendance,
plus a full complement of dodo birds. Bad company for a boy like Todd.'
'Certainly.'
'So let's get to the bottom line, shall we? I suggest a series of
appointments for Mr and Mrs Bowden at the Counselling Centre
downtown. Everything in confidence, of course. The man in charge down
there, Harry Ackerman, is a good friend of mine. And I don't think Todd
should go to them with the idea; I think you should.' Rubber Ed smiled
widely. 'Maybe we can get everybody back on track by June. It's not
impossible.'
But Bowden looked positively alarmed by this idea.
'I believe they might resent the boy if I took that proposal to them now,'
he said. 'Things are very delicate. They could go either way. The boy has
promised me he will work harder in his studies. He is very alarmed at this
drop in his marks.' He smiled thinly, a smile Ed French could not quite
interpret. 'More alarmed than you know.'
'But-'
'And they would resent me' Bowden pressed on quickly. 'God knows they
would. Monica already regards me as something of a meddler. I try not to
be, but you see the situation. I feel that things are best left alone for now.'
'I've had a great deal of experience in these matters,' Rubber Ed told
Bowden. He folded his hands on Todd's file and looked at the old man
earnestly. 'I really think counselling is in order here. You'll understand that
my interest in the marital problems your son and daughter-in-law are having
begins and ends with the effect they're having on Todd and right now,
they're having quite an effect.'
'Let me make a counter-proposal,' Bowden said. 'You have, I believe, a
system of marking halfway through each quarter?'
'Yes,' Rubber Ed agreed cautiously. 'Interpretation of Progress cards-IOP
Cards. The kids, of course, call them Flunk Cards. They only get them if
their grade in a given course is below 78 halfway through the quarter. In
other words, we give out IOP cards to kids who are pulling a D or an F in a
given course.'
'Very good,' Bowden said. "Then what I suggest is this: If the boy gets
one of those cards even one-He held up one gnarled finger '-I will
approach my son and his wife about your counselling. I will go further.' He
pronounced it furdah. 'If the boy receives one of your Flunk Cards in April -
'
'We give them out the first week in May, actually.'
'Yes? If he receives one then, I guarantee that they will accept the
counselling proposal. They are worried about their son, Mr French. But
now they are so wrapped up in their own problem that' He shrugged.
'I understand.'
'So let us give them that long to solve their own problems. Pulling one's
self up by one's own shoelaces that is the American way, is it not?'
'Yes, I guess it is,' Rubber Ed told him after a moment's thought and
after a quick glance at the clock, which told him he had another
appointment in five minutes. 'I'll accept that.'
He stood, and Bowden stood with him. They shook hands again, Rubber
Ed being carefully mindful of the old party's arthritis.
'But in all fairness, I ought to tell you that very few students can pull out
of an eighteen-week tailspin in just five weeks of classes. There's a huge
amount of ground to be made up-a huge amount. I suspect you'll have to
come through on your guarantee, Mr Bowden.'
Bowden offered his thin, disconcerting smile again. 'Do you?' was all he
said. Something had troubled Rubber Ed through the entire interview, and
he put his finger on it during lunch in the cafeteria, more than an hour after
'Lord Peter' had left, umbrella once again neatly tucked under his arm.
He and Todd's grandfather had talked for fifteen minutes at least,
probably closer to twenty, and Ed didn't think the old man had once referred
to his grandson by name. Todd pedalled breathlessly up Dussander's walk
and parked his bike on its kickstand. School had let out only fifteen minutes
before. He took the front steps at one jump, used his doorkey, and hurried
down the hall to the sunlit kitchen. His face was a hopeful landscape of
hopeful sunshine and gloomy clouds. He stood in the kitchen doorway for a
moment, his stomach and his vocal cords knotted, watching Dussander as
he rocked with his cupful of bourbon in his lap. He was still dressed in his
best, although he had pulled his tie down two inches and loosened the top
button of his shirt He looked at Todd expressionlessly, his lizard-like eyes at
halfmast. 'Well,' Todd finally managed.
Dussander left him hanging a moment longer, a moment that seemed at
least ten years long to Todd. Then, deliberately, Dussander set his cup on
the table next to his bottle of Ancient Age and said: 'The fool believed
everything.'
Todd let out his pentup breath in a whooping gust of relief.
Before he could draw another breath in, Dussander added: 'He wanted
your poor, troubled parents to attend counselling sessions downtown with a
friend of his. He was really quite insistent'
'Jesus! Did you what did you how did you handle it?'
'I thought quickly,' Dussander replied. 'Like the little girl in the Saki
story, invention on short notice is one of my strong points. I promised him
your parents would go in for such counselling if you received one Flunk
Card when they are given out the first week of May.'
The blood fell out of Todd's face.
'You did what?' he nearly screamed. 'I've already flunked two algebra
quizzes and a history test since the marking period started!' He advanced
into the room, his pale face now growing shiny with breaking sweat. 'There
was a French quiz this afternoon and I flunked that too I know I did. All I
could think about was that godamned Rubber Ed and whether or not you
were taking care of him. You took care of him, all right,' he finished bitterly.
'Not get one Flunk Card? I'll probably get five or six.'
'It was the best I could do without arousing suspicions,' Dussander said.
'This French, fool that he is, is only doing his job. Now you will do yours.'
'What's that supposed to mean?' Todd's face was ugly and thunderous, his
voice truculent
'You will work. In the next four weeks you will work harder than you
have ever worked in your life. Furthermore, on Monday you will go to each
of your instructors and apologize to them for your poor showing thus far.
You will -'
'It's impossible,' Todd said. 'You don't get it, man. It's impossible. I'm at
least five weeks behind in science and history. In algebra it's more like ten.'
'Nevertheless,' Dussander said. He poured more bourbon.
'You think you're pretty smart, don't you?' Todd shouted at him. 'Well, I
don't take orders from you. The days when you gave orders are long over.
Do you get it? He lowered his voice abruptly. "The most lethal thing you've
got around the house these days is a Shell No-Pest Strip. You're nothing but
a broken-down old man who farts rotten eggs if he eats a taco. I bet you
even pee in your bed.'
'Listen to me, snotnose,' Dussander said quietly.
Todd's head jerked angrily around at that.
'Before today,' Dussander said carefully, 'it was possible, just barely
possible, that you could have denounced me and come out clean yourself. I
don't believe you would have been up to the job with your nerves in their
present state, but never mind that. It would have been technically possible.
But now things have changed. Today I impersonated your grandfather, one
Victor Bowden. No one can have the slightest doubt that I did it with how
is the word? your connivance. If it comes out now, boy, you will look
blacker than ever. And you will have no defence. I took care of that today.'
'I wish-'
'You wish! You wish!' Dussander roared. 'Never mind your wishes, your
wishes make me sick, your wishes are no more than little piles of dogshit in
the gutter! All I want from you is to know if you understand the situation
we are in?'
'I understand it,' Todd muttered. His fists had been tightly clenched while
Dussander shouted at him-he was not used to being shouted at. Now he
opened his hands and dully observed that he had dug bleeding half-moons
into his palms. The cuts would have been worse, he supposed, but in the last
four months or so he had taken up biting his nails.
'Good. Then you will make your sweet apologies, and you will study. In
your free time at school you will study. During your lunch hours you will
study. After school you will come here and study, and on your weekends
you will come here and do more of the same.'
'Not here,' Todd said quickly. 'At home.'
'No. At home you will dawdle and daydream as you have all along. If
you are here I can stand over you if I have to and watch you. I can protect
my own interests in this matter. I can quiz you. I can listen to your lessons.'
'If I don't want to come here, you can't make me.'
Dussander drank. 'That is true. Things will then go on as they have. You
will fail. This guidance person, French, will expect me to make good on my
promise. When I don't, he will call your parents. They will find out that
kindly Mr Denker impersonated your grandfather at your request. They will
find out about the altered grades. They -'
'Oh, shut up. I'll come.'
'You're already here. Begin with algebra.'
'No way! It's Friday afternoon!'
'You study every afternoon now,' Dussander said softly. 'Begin with
algebra.'
Todd stared at him-only for a moment before dropping his eyes and
fumbling his algebra text out of his bookbag -and Dussander saw murder in
the boy's eyes. Not
figurative murder; literal murder. It had been years since he had seen that
dark, burning, speculative glance, but one never forgot it. He supposed he
would have seen it in his own eyes if there had been a mirror at hand on the
day he had looked at the white and defenceless nape of the boy's neck.
I must protect mysetf, he thought with some amazement. One
underestimates at one's own risk.
He drank his bourbon and rocked and watched the boy study.
It was nearly five o'clock when Todd biked home. He felt washed out,
hot-eyed, drained, impotently angry. Every time his eyes had wandered
from the printed page-from the maddening, incomprehensible, fucking
stupid world of sets, subsets, ordered pairs, and Cartesian co-ordinates -
Dussander's sharp old man's voice had spoken. Otherwise he had remained
completely silent except for the maddening bump of his slippers on the
floor and the squeak of the rocker. He sat there like a vulture waiting for its
prey to expire.
Why had he ever gotten into this? How had he gotten into it? This was a
mess, a terrible mess. He had picked up some ground this afternoon-some
of the set theory that had stumped him so badly just before the Christmas
break had fallen into place with an almost audible click-but it was
impossible to think he could pick up enough to scrape through next week's
algebra test with even a D.
It was five weeks until the end of the world.
On the corner he saw a bluejay lying on the sidewalk, its beak slowly
opening and closing. It was trying vainly to get onto its birdy-feet and hop
away. One of its wings had been crushed, and Todd supposed a passing car
had hit it and flipped it up onto the sidewalk like a tiddlywink. One of its
beady eyes stared up at him.
Todd looked at it for a long time, holding the grips of his bike's
apehanger handlebars lightly. Some of the warmth had gone out of the day
and the air felt almost chilly. He supposed his friends had spent the
afternoon goofing off down at the Babe Ruth diamond on Walnut Street,
maybe playing a little one-on-one, more likely playing pepper or three-flies-
six-grounders or roily-bat. It was the time of year when you started working
your way up to baseball. There was some talk about getting up their own
sandlot team this year to compete in the informal city league; there were
dads enough willing to shlepp them around to games. Todd, of course,
would pitch. He had been a Little League pitching star until he had grown
out of the Senior Little League division last year. Would have pitched.
So what? He'd just have to tell them no. He'd just have to tell them:
Guys, I got mixed up with this war criminal. I got him right by the balls,
and then-ha-ha, this'll killya, guys -then I found out he was holding my
balls as tight as I was holding his. I started having funny dreams and the
cold sweats. My grades went to hell and I changed them on my report card
so my folks wouldn't find out and now I've got to hit the books really hard
for the first time in my life. I'm not afraid of getting grounded, though. I'm
afraid of going to the reformatory. And that's why I can't play any sandlot
with you guys this year. You see how it is, guys.
A thin smile, much like Dussander's and not at all like his former broad
grin, touched his lips. There was no sunshine in it; it was a shady smile.
There was no fun in it; no confidence. It merely said, You see how it is,
guys.
He rolled his bike forward over the jay with exquisite slowness, hearing
the newspaper crackle of its feathers and the crunch of its small hollow
bones as they fractured inside it. He reversed, rolling over it again. It was
still twitching. He rolled over it again, a single bloody feather stuck in his
front tire, revolving up and down, up and down. By then the bird had
stopped moving, the bird had kicked the bucket, the
bird had punched out, the bird had gone to the great aviary in the sky, but
Todd kept going forward and backward across its mashed body just the
same. He did it for almost five minutes, and that thin smile never left his
face. You see how it is, guys.
10
April, 1975.
The old man stood halfway down the compound's aisle, smiling broadly,
as Dave Klingerman walked up to meet him. The frenzied barking that
filled the air didn't seem to bother him in the slightest, nor the smells of fur
and urine, nor the hundred different strays yapping and howling in their
cages, dashing back and forth, leaping against the mesh. Klingerman
pegged the old guy as a dog-lover right off the bat. His smile was sweet and
pleasant. He offered Dave a swollen, arthritis-bunched hand carefully, and
Klingerman shook it in the same spirit. 'Hello, sir!' he said, speaking up.
'Noisy as hell, isn't it?'
'I don't mind,' the old man said. 'Not at all. My name is Arthur Denker.'
'Klingerman. Dave Klingerman.'
'I am pleased to meet you, sir. I read in the paper -I could not believe it-
that you give dogs away here. Perhaps I misunderstood. In fact I think I
must have misunderstood.'
'No, we give 'em away, all right,' Dave said. 'If we can't we have to
destroy 'em. Sixty days, that's what the state gives us. Shame. Come on in
the office here. Quieter. Smells better, too.'
In the office, Dave heard a story that was familiar (but nonetheless
affecting): Arthur Denker was in his seventies. He had come to California
when his wife died. He was not rich, but he tended what he did have with
great care. He was lonely. His only friend was the boy who sometimes came
to his house and read to him. In Germany he had owned a beautiful St
Bernard. Now, in Santa Donato, he had a house with a good-sized back
yard.
The yard was fenced. And he had read in the paper would it be possible
that he could
'Well, we don't have any Bernards,' Dave said. 'They go fast because
they're so good with kids -'
'Oh, I understand. I didn't mean that-'
'- but I do have a half-grown Shepherd pup. How would that be?'
Mr Denker's eyes grew bright, as if he might be on the verge of tears.
'Perfect,'
he said.
'That would be perfect.'
The dog itself is free, but there are a few other charges. Distemper and
rabies shots. A city dog licence. All of it goes about twenty-five bucks for
most people, but the state pays half if you're over sixty-five-part of the
California Golden Ager programme.'
'Golden Ager is that what I am?' Mr. Denker said, and laughed. For just
a moment-it was silly-Dave felt a kind of chill.
'Uh I guess so, sir.'
'It is very reasonable.'
'Sure, we think so. The same dog would cost you a hundred and twenty-
five dollars in a pet shop. But people go to those places instead of here.
They are paying
for a set of papers, of course, not the dog.' Dave shook his head. 'If they
only understood how many fine animals are abandoned every year.'
'And if you can't find a suitable home for them within sixty days, they are
destroyed?'
'We put them to sleep, yes.'
'Put them to? I'm sorry, my English -'
'It's a city ordinance,' Dave said. 'Can't have dog-packs running the
streets.'
'You shoot them.'
'No, we give them gas. It's very humane. They don't feel a thing.'
'No,' Mr Denker said. 'I am sure they don't'
Todd's seat in Introduction to Algebra was four desks down in the second
row. He sat there, trying to keep his face expressionless, as Mr Storrman
passed back the exams. But his ragged fingernails were digging into his
palms again, and his entire body seemed to be running with a slow and
caustic sweat.
Don't get your hopes up. Don't be such a goddam chump. There's no way
you could have passed. You know you didn't pass.
Nevertheless, he could not completely squash the foolish hope. It had
been the first algebra exam in weeks that looked as if it had been written in
something other than Greek. He was sure that in his nervousness
(nervousness? no, call it what it had really been: outright terror) he had not
done that well, but maybe well, if it had been anyone else but Storrman,
who had a Yale padlock for a heart
STOP IT! he commanded himself, and for a moment, a coldly horrible
moment, he was positive he had screamed those two words aloud in the
classroom. You flunked, you know you did, not a thing in the world is
going to change it.
Storrman handed him his paper expressionlessly and moved on. Todd
laid it face-down on his initial-scarred desk. For a moment he didn't think
he possessed sufficient will to even turn it over and know. At last he flipped
it with such convulsive suddenness that the exam sheet tore. His tongue
stuck to the roof of his mouth as he stared at it. His heart seemed to stop for
a moment.
The number 83 was written in a circle at the top of the sheet. Below it
was a letter-grade: C Plus. Below the letter grade was a brief notation: Good
improvement! I think I'm twice as relieved as you should be. Check errors
carefully. At least three of them are arithmetical rather than conceptual.
His heartbeat began again, at triple-time. Relief washed over him, but it
was not cool-it was hot and complicated and strange. He closed his eyes,
not hearing the class as it buzzed over the exam and began the pre-ordained
fight for an extra point here or there.
Todd saw redness behind his eyes. It pulsed like flowing blood with the
rhythm of his heartbeat. In that instant he hated Dussander more than he
ever had before. His hands snapped shut into fists and he only wished,
wished, wished, that Dussander's scrawny chicken neck could have been
between them.
Dick and Monica Bowden had twin beds, separated by a nightstand with
a pretty imitation Tiffany lamp standing on it. Their room was done in
genuine redwood, and the walls were comfortably lined with books. Across
the room, nestled between two ivory bookends (bull elephants on their hind
legs) was a round Sony TV. Dick was watching Johnny Carson with the
earplugs in while Monica read the new Michael Crichton that had come
from the book club that day.
'Dick?' She put a bookmark (THIS IS WHERE I FELL ASLEEP, it said)
into the Crichton and closed it.
On the TV, Buddy Hackett had just broken everyone up. Dick smiled.
'Dick?' she said more loudly.
He pulled the earplugs out. 'What?'
'Do you think Todd's all right?'
He looked at her for a moment, frowning, then shook his head a little. 'Je
ne comprends pas, cherie.' His limping French was a joke between them; he
had met her in college when he was flunking his language requirement. His
father had sent him an extra two hundred dollars to hire a tutor. He had
gotten Monica Darrow, picking her name at random from the cards tacked
up on the Union bulletin board. By Christmas she had been wearing his
pin and he had managed a C in French.
'Well he's lost weight.'
'He looks a little scrawny, sure,' Dick said. He put the TV earplugs in his
lap, where they emitted tiny squawking sounds. 'He's growing up, Monica.'
'So soon?' she asked uneasily.
He laughed. 'So soon. I shot up seven inches as a teenager-from a five-
foot-six shrimp at twelve to the beautiful six-foot-one mass of muscle you
see before you today. My mother said that when I was fourteen you could
hear me growing in the night'
'Good thing not all of you grew that much.'
'It's all in how you use it.'
'Want to use it tonight?'
'The wench grows bold,' Dick Bowden said, and threw the earplugs
across the
room.
After, as he was drifting off to sleep: 'Dick, he's having bad dreams, too.'
'Nightmares?' he muttered.
'Nightmares. I've heard him moaning in his sleep two or three times when
I've gone down to use the bathroom in the night. I didn't want to wake him
up. It's silly, but my grandmother used to say you could drive a person
insane if you woke them up in the middle of a bad dream.'
'She was the Polack, wasn't she?'
'The Polack, yeah, the Polack. The mockie, why don't you say? Nice
talk!'
'You know what I mean. Why don't you just use the upstairs John?' He
had put it in himself two years ago.
'You know the flush always wakes you up,' she said.
'So don't flush it.'
'Dick, that's nasty.'
He sighed.
'Sometimes when I go in, he's sweating. And the sheets are damp.'
He grinned in the dark. 'I bet.'
'What's that oh.' She slapped him lightly. "That's nasty, too. Besides,
he's only thirteen.'
'Fourteen next month. He's not too young. A little precocious, maybe, but
not too young.'
'How old were you?'
'Fourteen or fifteen. I don't remember exactly. But I remember I woke up
thinking I'd died and gone to heaven.'
'But you were older than Todd is now.'
'All that stuffs happening younger. It must be the milk or the fluoride.
Do you know they have sanitary napkin dispensers in all the girls' rooms of
the school we built in Jackson Park last year? And that's a grammar school.
Now your average sixth-grader is only ten. How old were you when you
started?'
'I don't remember,' she said. 'All I know is Todd's dreams don't sound
like like he died and went to heaven.'
'Have you asked him about them?'
'Once. About six weeks ago. You were off playing golf with that horrible
Ernie Jacobs.'
'That horrible Ernie Jacobs is going to make me a full partner by 1977, if
he doesn't screw himself to death with that high yellow secretary of his
before then. Besides, he always pays the greens' fees. What did Todd say?'
'That he didn't remember. But a sort of shadow crossed his face. I think
he did remember.'
'Monica, I don't remember everything from my dear dead youth, but one
thing I do remember is that wet dreams are not always pleasant In fact, they
can be downright unpleasant.'
'How can that be?'
'Guilt All kinds of guilt. Some of it maybe all the way from babyhood,
when it was made very clear to him that wetting the bed was wrong. Then
there's the sex thing. Who knows what brings a wet dream on? Copping a
feel on the bus? Looking up a girl's skirt in study hall? I don't know. The
only one I can really remember was going off the high board at the YMCA
pool on coed day and losing my trunks when I hit the water.'
'You got off on that?' she asked, giggling a little.
'Yeah. So if the kid doesn't want to talk to you about his John Thomas
problems, don't force him.'
'We did our damn best to raise him without all those needless guilts.'
'You can't escape them. He brings them home from school like the colds
he used to pick up in the first grade. From his friends, or the way his
teachers mince around certain subjects. He probably got it from my dad,
too. "Don't touch it in the night, Todd, or your hands'!! grow hair and you'll
go blind and you'll start to lose your memory, and after a while your thing
will turn black and rot off. So be careful, Todd."'
'Dick Bowden! Your dad would never -'
'He wouldn't? Hell, he did. Just like your Jewish-Polack grandmother told
you that waking somebody up in the middle of a nightmare might drive
them nuts. He also told me to always wipe off the ring of a public toilet
before I sat on it so I wouldn't get "other people's germs". I guess that was
his way of saying syphilis. I bet your grandmother laid that one on you,
too.'
'No, my mother,' she said absently. 'And she told me to always flush.
Which is why I go downstairs.'
'It still wakes me up,' Dick mumbled.
'What?'
'Nothing.'
This time he had actually drifted halfway over the threshold of sleep
when she spoke his name again.
'What?' he asked, a little impatiently.
'You don't suppose oh, never mind. Go back to sleep.'
'No, go on, finish. I'm awake again. I don't suppose what?'
'That old man. Mr Denker. You don't think Todd's seeing too much of
him, do you? Maybe he's oh, I don't know filling Todd up with a lot of
stories.'
'The real heavy horrors,' Dick said. 'The day the Essen Motor Works
dropped below quota.' He snickered.
'It was just an idea,' she said, a little stiffly. The covers rustled as she
turned over on her side. 'Sorry I bothered you.'
He put a hand on her bare shoulder. 'I'll tell you something, babe,' he said,
and stopped for a moment, thinking carefully, choosing his words. 'I've been
worried about Todd too, sometimes. Not the same things you've been
worried about, but worried is worried, right?'
She turned back to him. 'About what?'
'Well, I grew up a lot different than he's growing up. My dad had the
store. Vic the Grocer, everyone called him. He had a book where he kept the
names of the people who owed him, and how much they owed. You know
what he called it?'
'No.' Dick rarely talked about his boyhood; she had always thought it was
because he hadn't enjoyed it She listened carefully now.
'He called it the Left Hand Book. He said the right hand was business,
but the right hand should never know what the left hand was doing. He said
if the right hand did know, it would probably grab a meat-cleaver and chop
the left hand right off.'
'You never told me that.'
'Well, I didn't like the old man very much when we first got married, and
the truth is I still spend a lot of time not liking him. I couldn't understand
why I had to wear pants from the Goodwill box while Mrs Mazursky could
get a ham on credit with that same old story about how her husband was
going back to work next week. The only work that fucking wino Bill
Mazursky ever had was holding onto a twelve-cent bottle of musky so it
wouldn't fly away.
'All I ever wanted in those days was to get out of the neighbourhood and
away from my old man's life. So I made grades and played sports I didn't
really like and got a scholarship at UCLA. And I made damn sure I stayed
in the top ten per cent of my classes because the only Left Hand Book the
colleges kept in those days was for the GIs that fought in the war. My dad
sent me money for my textbooks, but the only other money I ever took from
him was the time I wrote home in a panic because I was flunking
funnybook French. I met you. And I found out later from Mr. Henreid down
the block that my dad put a lien on his car to scare up cash. And now I've
got you, and we've got Todd. I've always thought he was a damned fine boy,
and I've tried to make sure he's always had everything he ever needed
anything that would help him grow into a fine man. I used to laugh at that
old wheeze about a man wanting his son to be better than he was, but as I
get older it seems less funny and more true. I never want Todd to have to
wear pants from a Goodwill box because some wino's wife got a ham on
credit. You understand?'
'Yes, of course I do,' she said quietly.
'Then, about ten years ago, just before my old man finally got tired of
fighting off the urban renewal guys and retired, he had a minor stroke. He
was in the hospital for ten days. And the people from the neighbourhood,
the guineas and the krauts, even some of the jigs that started to move in
around 1955 or so-they paid his bill. Every fucking cent.
I couldn't believe it. They kept the store open, too. Fiona Castellano got
four or five of her friends who were out of work to come in on shifts. When
my old man got back, the books balanced out to the cent.'
'Wow,' she said, very softly.
'You know what he said to me? My old man? That he'd always been
afraid of getting old-of being scared and hurting and all by himself. Of
having to go into the hospital and not being able to make ends meet
anymore. Of dying. He said that after the stroke he wasn't scared anymore.
He said he thought he could die well. "You mean
die happy, pop?" I asked him. "No," he said. "I don't think anyone dies
happy, Dickie." He always called me Dickie, still does, and that's another
thing I guess I'll never be able to like. He said he didn't think anyone died
happy, but you could die well. That impressed me.'
He was silent for a long, thoughtful time.
"The last five or six years I've been able to get some perspective on my
old man. Maybe because he's down there in Sandoro and out of my hair. I
started thinking that maybe the Left Hand Book wasn't such a bad idea.
That was when I started to worry about Todd. I kept wanting to tell him
about there was maybe something more to life than me being able to take
all of you to Hawaii for a month or being able to buy Todd pants that don't
smell like the mothballs they used to put in the Goodwill box. I could never
figure out how to tell him those things. But I think maybe he knows. And it
takes a load off my mind.'
'Reading to Mr Denker, you mean?'
'Yes. He's not getting anything for that. Denker can't pay him. Here's this
old guy, thousands of miles from any friends or relatives that might still be
living, here's this guy that's everything my father was afraid of. And there's
Todd.'
'I never thought of it just like that.'
'Have you noticed the way Todd gets when you talk to him about that old
man?'
'He gets very quiet.'
'Sure. He gets tongue-tied and embarrassed, like he was doing something
nasty. Just like my pop used to when someone tried to thank him for laying
some credit on them. We're Todd's right hand, that's all. You and me and all
the rest-the house, the ski-trips to Tahoe, the Thunderbird in the garage, his
colour TV. All his right hand. And he doesn't want us to see what his left
hand is up to.'
'You don't think he's seeing too much of Denker, then?'
'Honey, look at his grades! If they were falling off, I'd be the first one to
say hey, enough is enough, already, don't go overboard. His grades are the
first place trouble would show up. And how have they been?'
'As good as ever, after that first slip.'
'So what are we talking about? Listen, I've got a conference at nine, babe.
If I don't get some sleep, I'm going to be sloppy.'
'Sure, go to sleep,' she said indulgently, and as he turned over, she kissed
him lightly on one shoulderblade. 'I love you.'
'Love you too,' he said comfortably, and closed his eyes. 'Everything's
fine, Monica. You worry too much.'
'I know I do. Goodnight.'
They slept.
'Stop looking out the window,' Dussander said. 'There is nothing out there
to interest you.'
Todd looked at him sullenly. His history text was open on the table,
showing a colour plate of Teddy Roosevelt cresting San Juan Hill. Helpless
Cubans were falling away from the hooves of Teddy's horses. Teddy was
grinning a wide American grin, the grin of a man who knew that God was
in His heaven and everything was bully. Todd Bowden was not grinning.
'You like being a slave-driver, don't you?' he asked.
'I like being a free man,' Dussander said. 'Study.'
'Suck my cock.'
'As a boy,' Dussander said, 'I would have had my mouth washed out with
lye soap for saying such a thing.'
Times change.'
'Do they?' Dussander sipped his bourbon. 'Study.'
Todd stared at Dussander. 'You're nothing but a goddamned rummy. You
know that?'
'Study.'
'Shut up!' Todd slammed his book shut It made a riflecrack sound in
Dussander's kitchen.
'I can never catch up, anyway. Not in time for the test There's fifty pages
of this shit left, all the way up to World War I. I'll make a crib in Study Hall
2 tomorrow.'
Harshly, Dussander said: 'You will do no such thing!'
'Why not? Who's going to stop me? You?'
'Boy, you are still having a hard time comprehending the stakes we play
for. Do you think I enjoy keeping your snivelling brat nose in your books?'
His voice rose, whipsawing, demanding, commanding. 'Do you think I
enjoy listening to your tantrums, your kindergarten swears? "Suck my
cock",' Dussander mimicked savagely in a high, falsetto voice that made
Todd flush darkly. '"Suck my cock, so what, who cares, I'll do it tomorrow,
suck my cock"!'
'Well, you like it!' Todd shouted back. 'Yeah, you like it! The only time
you don't feel like a zombie is when you're on my back! So give me a
fucking break!'
'If you are caught with one of these cribbing papers, what do you think
will happen? Who will be told first?'
Todd looked at his hands with their ragged, bitten fingernails and said
nothing.
'Who?'
'Jesus, you know. Rubber Ed. Then my folks, I guess.'
Dussander nodded. 'Me, I guess that too. Study. Put your cribbing paper
in your head, where it belongs.'
'I hate you,' Todd said dully. 'I really do.' But he opened his book again
and Teddy Roosevelt grinned up at him, Teddy galloping into the twentieth
century with his sabre in his hand, Cubans falling back in disarray before
him -possibly before the force of his fierce American grin.
Dussander began to rock again. He held his teacup of bourbon in his
hands. "That's a good boy,' he said, almost tenderly.
Todd had his first wet-dream on the last night of April, and awoke to the
sound of rain whispering secretly through the leaves and branches of the
tree outside his window.
In the dream, he had been in one of the Patin laboratories. He was
standing at the end of a long, low table. A lush young girl of amazing
beauty had been secured to this table with clamps. Dussander was assisting
him. Dussander wore a white butcher's apron and nothing else. When he
pivoted to turn on the monitoring equipment, Todd could see Dussander's
scrawny buttocks grinding at each other like misshapen white stones.
He handed something to Todd, something he recognized immediately,
although he had never actually seen one. It was a dildo. The tip of it was
polished metal, winking in the light of the overhead fluorescents like
heartless chrome. The dildo was hollow. Snaking out of it was a black
electrical cord that ended in a red rubber bulb.
'Go ahead,' Dussander said. 'The Fuehrer says it's all right. He says it's
your reward for studying.'
Todd looked down at himself and saw that he was naked. His small penis
was fully erect, jutting plumply up at an angle from the thin peachdown of
his pubic hair. He slipped the dildo on. The fit was tight but there was some
sort of lubricant in there. The friction was pleasant. No; it was more than
pleasant. It was delightful.
He looked down at the girl and felt a strange shift in his thoughts as if
they had slipped into a perfect groove. Suddenly all things seemed right.
Doors had been opened. He would go through them. He took the red bulb in
his left hand, put his knees on the table, and paused for just a moment,
gauging the angle while his Norseman's prick made his own angle up and
out from his slight boy's body.
Dimly, far off, he could hear Dussander reciting: Test run eighty-four.
Electricity, sexual stimulus, metabolism. Based on the Thyssen theories of
negative reinforcement. Subject is a young Jewish girl, approximately
sixteen years of age, no scars, no identifying marks, no known disabilities -'
She cried out when the tip of the dildo touched her. Todd found the cry
pleasant, as he did her fruitless struggles to free herself, or, lacking that, to
at least bring her legs together.
This is what they can't show in those magazines about the war, he
thought, but it's there, just the same.
He thrust forward suddenly, parting her with no grace. She shrieked like
a firebell.
After her initial thrashing and efforts to expel him, she lay perfectly still,
enduring. The lubricated interior of the dildo pulled and slid against Todd's
engorgement. Delightful. Heavenly. His fingers toyed with the rubber bulb
in his left hand. Far away, Dussander recited pulse, blood pressure,
respiration, alpha waves, beta waves, stroke count.
As the climax began to build inside him, Todd became perfectly still and
squeezed the bulb. Her eyes, which had been closed, flew open, bulging.
Her tongue fluttered in the pink cavity of her mouth. Her arms and legs
thrummed. But the real action was in her torso, rising and falling, vibrating,
every muscle (oh every muscle every muscle moves tightens closes every)
every muscle and the sensation at climax was (ecstasy) oh it was, it was (the
end of the world thundering outside).
He woke to that sound and the sound of rain. He was huddled on his side
in a dark ball, his heart beating at a sprinter's pace. His lower belly was
covered with a warm, sticky liquid. There was an instant of panicky horror
when he feared he might be bleeding to death and then he realized what it
really was, and he felt a fainting, nauseated revulsion. Semen. Come. Jizz.
Jungle-juice. Words from fences and locker rooms and the walls of gas
station bathrooms. There was nothing here he wanted. His hands balled
helplessly into fists. His dream-climax recurred to him, pallid now,
senseless, frightening. But nerve-endings still tingled, retreating slowly
from their spike-point That final scene, fading now, was disgusting and yet
somehow compulsive, like an unsuspecting bite into a piece of tropical fruit
which, you realized (a second too late), had only tasted so amazingly sweet
because it was rotten. It came to him then. What he would have to do. There
was only one way he could get himself back again. He would have to kill
Dussander. It was the only way. Games were done; storytime was over. This
was survival.
'Kill him and it's all over,' he whispered in the darkness, with the rain in
the tree outside and semen drying on his belly. Whispering it made it seem
real.
Dussander always kept three or four fifths of Ancient Age on a shelf over
the steep cellar stairs. He would go to the door, open it (half-crocked
already, more often than not), and go down two steps. Then he would lean
out, put one hand on the shelf, and grip the fresh bottle by the neck with his
other hand. The cellar floor was not paved, but the din was hard-packed and
Dussander, with a machinelike efficiency that Todd now thought of as
Prussian rather than German, oiled it once every two months to keep bugs
from breeding in the dirt Cement or no cement, old bones break easily. And
old men have accidents. The post-mortem would show that 'Mr. Denker'
had had a skinful of booze when he 'fell'. What happened, Todd?
He didn't answer the door so I used the key he made for me. Sometimes
he falls asleep. I went into the kitchen and saw the cellar door was open. I
went down the stairs and he he
Then, of course, tears. It would work.
He would have himself back again. For a long time Todd lay awake in
the dark, listening to the thunder retreat westward, out over the Pacific,
listening to the secret sound of the rain. He thought he would stay awake
the rest of the night, going over it and over it But he fell asleep only
moments later and slept dreamlessly with one fist carted under his chin. He
woke on the first of May fully rested for the first time in months.
11
May, 1975.
For Todd, that Friday in the middle of the month was the longest of his
life. He sat in class after class, hearing nothing, waiting only for the last five
minutes, when the instructor a would take out his or her small pile of Flunk
Cards and distribute them. Each time an instructor approached Todd's desk
with that pile of cards, he grew cold. Each time he or she passed him
without stopping, he felt waves of dizziness and a semi-hysteria.
Algebra was the worst. Storrman approached hesitated and just as
Todd became convinced he was going to pass on, he laid a Flunk Card face-
down on Todd's desk. Todd looked at it coldly, with no feelings at all. Now
that it had happened, he was only cold. Well, that's it, he thought. Point,
game, set, and match. Unless Dussander can think of something else. And I
have my doubts.
Without much interest, he turned the Flunk Card over to see by how
much he had missed his C. It must have been close, but trust old Stony
Storrman not to give anyone a- He saw that the grade-spaces were utterly
blank -the letter-grade space and the numerical-grade space. Written in the
COMMENTS section was this message: I'm sure glad I don't have to give
you one of these for real! Chas. Storrman.
The dizziness came again, more savagely this time, roaring through his
head, making it feel like a balloon filled with helium. He gripped the sides
of his desk as hard as he could, holding one thought with total obsessive
tightness: You will not faint, not faint, not faint. Little by little the waves of
dizziness passed, and then he had to control an urge to run up the aisle after
Storrman, turn him around, and poke his eyes out with the freshly
sharpened pencil he held in his hand. And through it all his face remained
carefully blank. The only sign that anything at all was going inside was a
mild tic in one eyelid. School let out for the week fifteen minutes later.
Todd walked slowly around the building to the bike-racks, his head down,
his hands shoved into his pockets, his books tucked into the crook of his
right arm, oblivious of the running,
shouting students. He tossed the books into his bike-basket, unlocked the
Schwinn, and pedalled away. Towards Dussander's house.
Today, he thought Today is your day, old man.
'And so,' Dussander said, pouring bourbon -into his cup as Todd entered
the kitchen, 'the accused returns from the dock. How said they, prisoner?'
He was wearing his bathrobe and a pair of hairy wool socks that climbed
halfway up his shins. Socks like that, Todd thought, would be easy to slip
in. He glanced at the bottle of Ancient Age Dussander was currently
working. It was down to the last three fingers.
'No Ds, no Fs, no Flunk Cards,' Todd said. 'I'll still have to change some
of my grades in June, but maybe just the averages. I'll be getting all As and
Bs this quarter if I keep up my work.'
'Oh, you'll keep it up, all right,' Dussander said. 'We will see to it.' He
drank and then tipped more bourbon into his cup. This calls for a
celebration.' His speech was slightly blurred-hardly enough to be
noticeable, but Todd knew the old fuck was as drunk as he ever got. Yes,
today. It would have to be today.
But he was cool.
'Celebrate pigshit,' he told Dussander.
'I'm afraid the delivery boy hasn't arrived with the beluga and the truffles
yet,' Dussander said, ignoring him. 'Help is so unreliable these days. What
about a few Ritz crackers and some Velveeta while we wait?'
'Okay,' Todd said. 'What the hell.'
Dussander stood up (one knee banged the table, making him wince) and
crossed to the refrigerator. He got out the cheese, took a knife from the
drawer and a plate from the cupboard, and a box of Ritz crackers from the
breadbox.
'All carefully injected with prussic acid,' he told Todd as he set the cheese
and crackers down on the table. He grinned, and Todd saw that he had left
out his false teeth again today. Nevertheless, Todd smiled back.
'So quiet today!' Dussander exclaimed. 'I would have expected you to
turn handsprings all the way up the hall.' He emptied the last of the bourbon
into his cup, sipped, smacked his lips.
'I guess I'm still numb,' Todd said. He bit into a cracker. He had stopped
refusing Dussander's food a long time ago. Dussander thought there was a
letter with one of Todd's friends-there was not, of course; he had friends,
but none he trusted that much.
He supposed Dussander had guessed that long ago, but he knew
Dussander didn't quite dare put his guess to such an extreme test as murder.
'What shall we talk about today?' Dussander enquired, tossing off the last
shot. 'I give you the day off from studying, how's that? Uh? Uh?' When he
drank, his accent became thicker. It was an accent Todd had come to hate.
Now he felt okay about the accent; he felt okay about everything. He felt
very cool all over. He looked at his hands, the hands which would give the
push, and they looked just as they always did. They were not trembling;
they were cool.
'I don't care,' he said. 'Anything you want.'
'Shall I tell you about the special soap we made? Our experiments with
enforced homosexuality? Or perhaps you would like to hear how I escaped
Berlin after I had been foolish enough to go back. That was a close one, I
can tell you.' He pantomimed shaving one stubbly cheek and. laughed.
'Anything,' Todd said. 'Really.' He watched Dussander examine the empty
bottle and then get up with it in one hand. Dussander took it to the
wastebasket and dropped it in.
'No, none of those, I think,' Dussander said. 'You don't seem to be in the
mood.' He stood reflectively by the wastebasket for a moment and then
crossed the kitchen to the cellar door. His wool socks whispered on the hilly
linoleum. 'I think today I will instead tell you the story of an old man who
was afraid.'
Dussander opened the cellar door. His back was now to the table. Todd
stood up quietly.
'He was afraid,' Dussander went on, 'of a certain young boy who was, in a
queer way, his friend. A smart boy. His mother called this boy "apt pupil",
and the old man had already discovered he was an apt pupil although
perhaps not in the way his mother thought'
Dussander fumbled with the old-fashioned electrical switch on the wall,
trying to turn it with his bunched and clumsy fingers. Todd walked-almost
glided-across the linoleum, not stepping in any of the places where it
squeaked or creaked. He knew this kitchen as well as his own, now. Maybe
better.
'At first, the boy was not the old man's friend,' Dussander said. He
managed to turn the switch at last. He descended the first step with a
veteran drunk's care. 'At first the old man disliked the boy a great deal.
Then he grew to to enjoy his company, although there was still a strong
element of dislike there.' He was looking at the shelf now but still holding
the railing. Todd, cool-no, now he was cold-stepped behind him and
calculated the chances of one strong push dislodging Dussander's hold on
the railing. He decided to wait until Dussander leaned forward.
'Part of the old man's enjoyment came from a feeling of equality,'
Dussander went on thoughtfully. 'You see, the boy and the old man had each
other in mutual deathgrips.
Each knew something the other wanted kept secret. And then ah, then it
became apparent to the old man that things were changing. Yes. He was
losing his hold-some of it or all of it, depending on how desperate the boy
might be, and how clever. It occurred to this old man on one long and
sleepless night that it might be well for him to acquire a new hold on the
boy. For his own safety.'
Now Dussander let go of the railing and leaned out over the steep cellar
stairs, but Todd remained perfectly still. The bone-deep cold was melting
out of him, being replaced by a rosy flush of anger and confusion. As
Dussander grasped his fresh bottle, Todd thought viciously that the old man
had the stinkiest cellar in town, oil or no oil. It smelled as if something had
died down there.
'So the old man got out of his bed right then. What is sleep to an old
man? Very little.
And he sat at his small desk, thinking about how cleverly he had
enmeshed the boy in the very crimes the boy was holding over his own
head. He sat thinking about how hard the boy had worked, how very hard,
to bring his school marks back up. And how, when they were back up, he
would have no further need for the old man alive. And if the old man were
dead, the boy could be free.'
He turned around now, holding the fresh bottle of Ancient Age by the
neck.
'I heard you, you know,' he said, almost gently. 'From the moment you
pushed your chair back and stood up. You are not as quiet as you imagine,
boy. At least not yet.'
Todd said nothing.
'So!' Dussander exclaimed, stepping back into the kitchen and closing the
cellar door firmly behind him. "The old man wrote everything down, nicht
wahr! From first word to last he wrote it down. When he was finally
finished it was almost dawn and his hand was singing from the arthritis-the
verdammt arthritis-but he felt
good for the first time in weeks. He felt safe, He got back into his bed
and slept until mid-afternoon. In fact, if he had slept any longer, he would
have missed his favorite-General Hospital.'
He had regained his rocker now. He sat down, produced a worn jackknife
with a yellow ivory handle, and began to cut painstakingly around the seal
covering the top of the bourbon bottle.
'On the following day the old man dressed in his best suit and went down
to the bank where he kept his little checking and savings accounts. He
spoke to one of the bank officers, who was able to answer all the old man's
questions most satisfactorily. He rented a safety deposit box. The bank
officer explained to the old man that he would have a key and the bank
would have a key. To open the box, both keys would be needed. No one but
the old man could use the old man's key without a signed, notarized letter of
permission from the old man himself. With one exception.'
Dussander smiled toothlessly into Todd Bowden's white, set face.
'That exception is made in event of the box-holder's death,' he said. Still
looking at Todd, still smiling, Dussander put his jackknife back into the
pocket of his robe, unscrewed the cap of the bourbon bottle, and poured a
fresh jolt into his cup.
'What happens then?' Todd asked hoarsely.
'Then the box is opened in the presence of a bank official and a
representative of the Internal Revenue Service. The contents of the box are
inventoried.
In this case they will find only a twelve-page document. Non-taxable
but highly interesting.'
The fingers of Todd's hands crept towards each other and locked tightly.
'You can't do that,' he said in a stunned and unbelieving voice. It was the
voice of a person who observes another person walking on the ceiling. 'You
can't can't do that.'
'My boy,' Dussander said kindly, 'I have.'
'But I you' His voice suddenly rose to an agonized howl. 'You're old!
Don't you know that you're old? You could die! You could die anytime!'
Dussander got up. He went to one of the kitchen cabinets and took down
a small glass.
This glass had once held jelly. Cartoon characters danced around the rim.
Todd recognized them all-Fred and Wilma Flintstone, Barney and Betty
Rubble, Pebbles and Bam-Bam. He had grown up with them. He watched
as Dussander wiped this jelly-glass almost ceremonially with a dishtowel.
He watched as Dussander set it in front of him. He watched as Dussander
poured a finger of bourbon into it.
'What's that for?' Todd muttered. 'I don't drink. Drinking's for cheap
stewbums like you.'
'Lift your glass, boy. It is a special occasion. Today you drink.'
Todd looked at him for a long moment, then picked up the glass.
Dussander clicked his cheap ceramic cup smartly against it.
'I make a toast, boy-long life! Long life to both of us! Prosit!' He tossed
his bourbon off at a gulp and then began to He rocked back and forth,
stockinged feet hitting the floor and Todd thought he had never looked more
like a vulture, a vulture in a bathrobe, a noisome beast of carrion.
'I hate you,' he whispered, and then Dussander began to choke on his own
laughter. His face turned a dull brick colour; it sounded as if he were
coughing, laughing, and strangling, all at the same time. Todd, scared, got
up quickly and clapped him on the back until the coughing fit had passed.
'Danke schon,' he said. 'Drink your drink. It will do you good.'
Todd drank it. It tasted like very bad cold-medicine and lit a fire in his
gut.
'I can't believe you drink this shit all day,' he said, putting the glass back
on the table and shuddering. 'You ought to quit it. Quit drinking and
smoking.'
'Your concern for my health is touching,' Dussander said. He produced a
crumpled pack of cigarettes from the same bathrobe pocket into which the
jackknife had disappeared.
'And I am equally solicitous of your own welfare, boy. Almost every day
I read in the paper where a cyclist has been killed at a busy intersection.
You should give it up. You should walk. Or ride the bus, like me.'
'Why don't you go fuck yourself?' Todd burst out.
'My boy," Dussander said, pouring more bourbon and beginning to laugh
again, 'we are fucking each other-didn't you know that?'
One day about a week later, Todd was sitting on a disused mail platform
down in the old trainyard. He chucked cinders out across the rusty, weed-
infested tracks one at a time.
Why shouldn't I kill him anyway?
Because he was a logical boy, the logical answer came first. No reason at
all. Sooner or later Dussander was going to die, and given Dussander's
habits, it would probably be sooner. Whether he killed the old man or
whether Dussander died of a heart attack in his bathtub, it was all going to
come out. At least he could have the pleasure of wringing the old vulture's
neck.
Sooner or later-that phrase defied logic.
Maybe it'll be later, Todd thought. Cigarettes or not, booze or not, he's a
tough old bastard. He's lasted this long, so so maybe it'll be later. From
beneath him came a fuzzy snort.
Todd jumped to his feet, dropping the handful of cinders he had been
holding. That snorting sound came again.
He paused, on the verge of running, but the snort didn't recur. Nine
hundred yards away, an eight-lane freeway swept across the horizon above
this weed- and junk-strewn cul-de-sac with its deserted buildings, rusty
cyclone fences, and splintery, warped platforms. The cars up on the freeway
glistened in the sun like exotic hard-shelled beetles. Eight lanes of traffic up
there, nothing down here but Todd, a few birds and whatever had snorted.
Cautiously, he bent down with his hands on his knees and peered under the
mail platform. There was a wino lying up in there among the yellow weeds
and empty cans and dusty old bottles. It was impossible to tell his age; Todd
put him at somewhere between thirty and four hundred. He was wearing a
strappy tee-shirt that was caked with dried vomit, green pants that were far
too big for him, and grey leather workshoes cracked in a hundred places.
The cracks gaped like agonized mouths. Todd thought he smelled like
Dussander's cellar.
The wino's red-laced eyes opened slowly and stared at Todd with a bleary
lack of wonder. As they did, Todd thought of the Swiss Army knife in his
pocket, the Angler model. He had purchased it at a sporting goods store in
Redondo Beach almost a year ago. He could hear the clerk that had waited
on him in his mind: You couldn't pick a better knife than that one, son- a
knife like that could save your life someday. We sell fifteen hundred Swiss
knives every damn year. Fifteen hundred a year.
He put his hand in his pocket and gripped the knife. In his mind's eye he
saw Dussander's jackknife working slowly around the neck of the bourbon
bottle, slitting the seal. A moment later he became aware that he had an
erection. Cold terror stole into him.
The wino swiped a hand over his cracked lips and then ticked them with
a tongue which nicotine had turned a permanent dismal yellow. 'Got a dime,
kid?' Todd looked at him expressionlessly.
'Gotta get to LA. Need another dime for the bus. I got a pointment, me.
Got a job offertunity. Nice kid like you must have a dime. Maybe you got a
quarter.' Yessir, you could clean out a damn bluegill with a knife tike that
hell, you could clean out a damn marlin with it if you had to. We sell fifteen
hundred of those a year. Every sporting goods store and Army-Navy
Surplus in America sells them, and (if you decided to use this one to clean
out some dirty, shitty old wino, nobody could trace it back to you,
absolutely NOBODY.)
The wino's voice dropped; it became a confidential, tenebrous whisper.
'For a buck I'd do you a blowjob, you never had a better. You'd come your
brains out, kid, you'd -'
Todd pulled his hand out of his pocket. He wasn't sure what was in it
until he opened it. Two quarters. Two nickels a dime. Some pennies. He
threw them at the wino and fled.
12
June, 1975.
Todd Bowden, now fourteen, came biking up Dussander's walk and
parked his bike on the kickstand. The LA Times was on the bottom step; he
picked it up. He looked at the bell, below which the neat legends ARTHUR
DENKER and NO SOLICITORS, NO PEDDLERS, NO SALESMEN still
kept their places. He didn't bother with the bell now, of course; he had his
key.
Somewhere close by was the popping, burping sound of a Lawn Boy. He
looked at Dussander's grass and saw it could use a cutting; he would have to
tell the old man to find a boy with a mower. Dussander forgot little things
like that more often now. Maybe it was senility; maybe it was just the
pickling influence of Ancient Age on his brains. That was an adult thought
for a boy of fourteen to have, but such thoughts no longer struck Todd as
singular. He had many adult thoughts these days. Most of them were not so
great.
He let himself in.
He had his usual instant of cold terror as he entered the kitchen and saw
Dussander slumped slightly sideways in his rocker, the cup on the table, a
half-empty bottle of bourbon beside it. A cigarette had burned its entire
length down to lacy grey ash in a mayonnaise cover where several other
butts had been mashed out. Dussander's mouth hung open. His face was
yellow. His big hands dangled limply over the rocker's arms. He didn't seem
to be breathing.
'Dussander,' he said, a little too harshly. 'Rise and shine, Dussander.' He
felt a wave of relief as the old man twitched, blinked, and finally sat up. 'Is
it you? And so early?'
They let us out early on the last day of school,' Todd said. He pointed to
the remains of the cigarette in the mayonnaise cover. 'Someday you'll burn
down the house doing that.'
'Maybe,' Dussander said indifferently. He fumbled out his cigarettes, shot
one from the pack (it almost rolled off the edge of the table before
Dussander was able to catch it), and at last got it going. A protracted fit of
coughing followed, and Todd winced in disgust. When the old man really
got going, Todd half-expected him to start spitting out greyish-black chunks
of lung-tissue onto the table and he'd probably grin as he did it. At last the
coughing eased enough for Dussander to say, 'What have you got there?'
'Report-card.'
Dussander took it, opened it, and held it away from him at arm's length
so he could read it. 'English A. American History A. Earth Science B
Plus. Your Community and You A. Primary French B Minus. Beginning
Algebra B.' He put it down. 'Very good. What is the slang? We have saved
your bacon, boy. Will you have to change any of these averages in the last
column?'
'French and Algebra, but no more than eight or nine points in all. I don't
think any of this is ever going to come out. And I guess I owe that to you.
I'm not proud of it, but it's the truth. So, thanks.'
'What a touching speech,' Dussander said, and began to cough again.
'I guess I won't be seeing you around too much from now on,' Todd said,
and Dussander abruptly stopped coughing.
'No?' he said, politely enough.
'No,' Todd said. 'We're going to Hawaii for a month starting on 25 June.
In September I'll be going to school across town. It's this bussing thing.'
'Oh yes, the Schwarzen,' Dussander said, idly watching a by as it trundled
across the red and white check of the tablecloth. 'For twenty years this
country has worried and whined about the Schwarzen. But we know the
solution don't we, boy?' He smiled toothlessly at Todd and Todd looked
down, feeling the old sickening lift and drop of his stomach.
Terror, hate, and a desire to do something so awful: could only be fully
contemplated in his dreams.
'Look, I plan to go to college, in case you didn't know,' Todd said. 'I know
that's a long time off, but I think about it. I even know what I want to major
in. History.'
'Admirable. He who will not learn from the past is -'
'Oh, shut up,' Todd said.
Dussander did so, amiably enough. He knew the boy wasn't done not
yet. He sat with his hands folded, watching him.
'I could get my letter back from my friend,' Todd suddenly blurted. 'You
know that? I could let you read it, and then you could watch me burn it. If-'
'- if I would remove a certain document from my safety deposit box.'
'Well yeah.'
Dussander uttered a long, windy, rueful sigh. 'My boy,' he said. 'Still you
do not understand the situation. You never have, right from the beginning.
Partly because you are only a boy, but not entirely even then, even in the
beginning, you were a very old boy. No, the real villain was and is your
absurd American self-confidence that never allowed you to consider the
possible consequences of what you were doing which does not allow it
even now.'
Todd began to speak and Dussander raised his hands adamantly, suddenly
the world's oldest traffic cop.
'No, don't contradict me. It's true. Go on if you like. Leave the house, get
out of here, never come back. Can I stop you? No. Of course I can't. Enjoy
yourself in Hawaii while I sit in this hot, grease-smelling kitchen and wait
to see if the Schwarzen in Watts will decide to start killing policemen and
burning their shitty tenements again this year. I can't stop you anymore than
I can stop getting older a day at a time.'
He looked at Todd fixedly, so fixedly that Todd looked away.
'Down deep inside, I don't like you. Nothing could make me like you.
You forced yourself on me. You are an unbidden guest in my house. You
have made me open crypts perhaps better left shut, because I have
discovered that some of the corpses were buried alive, and that a few of
those still have some wind left in them.
'You yourself have become enmeshed, but do I pity you because of that?
Gott im Himmel! You have made your bed; should I pity you if you sleep
badly in it? No I don't pity you, and I don't like you, but I have come to
respect you a little bit. So don't try my patience by asking me to explain this
twice. We could obtain our documents and destroy them here in my kitchen.
And still it would not be over. We would, in fact, be no better off than we
are at this minute.'
'I don't understand you.'
'No, because you have never studied the consequences of what you have
set in
motion.
But attend me, boy. If we burned our letters here, in this jar cover, how
would I know you hadn't made a copy? Or two? Or three? Down at the
library they have a Xerox machine, for a nickel anyone can make a
photocopy. For a dollar, you could post a copy of my death-warrant on
every streetcorner for twenty blocks. Four miles of death-warrants, boy!
Think of it! Can you tell me how I would know you hadn't done such a
thing?'
'I well, I I' Todd realized he was floundering and forced himself to
shut his mouth.
Dussander had just outlined a piece of duplicity so fundamental that it
had simply never crossed his mind. He opened his mouth to say so, realized
Dussander would not believe him and that, in fact, was the problem.
He shut his mouth again, this time with a snap.
'And how would you know I hadn't made two copies for my safety
deposit box that I had burned one and left the other there?'
Todd was silent and dismayed.
'Even if there were some impartial third party we could go to, always
there would be doubts. The problem is insoluble, boy. Believe it.'
'Shit,' Todd said in a very small voice.
Dussander took a deep drink from his cup and looked at Todd over the
rim.
'Now I tell you two more things, boy. First, that if your part in this matter
came out, your punishment would be quite small. It is even possible-no,
more than that, likely-that it would never come out in the papers at all. I
frightened you with reform school once, when I was badly afraid you might
crack and tell everything. But do I believe that? No -I used it the way a
father will use the "boogeyman" to frighten a child into coming home
before dark. I don't believe that they would send you there, not in this
country where they spank killers on the wrist and send them out into the
streets to kill again after two years of watching colour TV in a penitentiary.
'But it might well ruin your life all the same. There are records and
people
talk.
Always, they talk. Such a juicy scandal is not allowed to wither; it is
bottled, like wine.
And, of course, as the years pass, your culpability will grow with you.
Your silence will grow more damning. If the truth came out today, people
would say, "But he is just a child!" not knowing, as I do, what an old child
you are. But what would they say, boy, if the truth about me, coupled with
the fact that you knew about me as early as 1974 but kept silent, came out
while you are in high school? That would be
bad. For it to come out while you are in college would be disaster. As a
young man just starting out in business armageddon. You understand this
first thing?'
Todd was silent, but Dussander seemed satisfied. He nodded.
Still nodding, he said: 'Second, I don't believe you have a letter.'
Todd strove to keep a poker face, but he was terribly afraid his eyes had
widened in shock. Dussander was studying him avidly, and Todd was
suddenly, nakedly aware that this old man had interrogated hundreds,
perhaps thousands of people. He was an expert.
Todd felt that his skull had turned to window-glass and all things were
flashing inside in large letters.
'I asked myself who you would trust so much. Who are your friends
who do you run with? Who does this boy, this self-sufficient, coldly
controlled little boy, go to with his loyalty? The answer is, nobody.'
Dussander's eyes gleamed yellowly.
'Many times I have studied you and calculated the odds. I know you, and
I know much of your character-no, not all, because one human being can
never know everything that is in another human being's heart-but I know so
little about what you do and who you see outside of this house. So I think,
"Dussander, there is a chance that you are wrong. After all these years, do
you want to be captured and maybe killed because you misjudged a boy?"
Maybe when I was younger, I would have taken the chance-the odds are
good odds, and the chance is a small chance. It is very strange to me, you
know-the older one becomes, the less one has to lose in matters of life and
death and yet, one becomes more and more conservative.' He looked hard
into Todd's face.
'I have one more thing to say, and then you can go when you want. What
I have to say is that, while I doubt the existence of your letter, never doubt
the existence of mine. The document I have described to you exists. If I die
today tomorrow everything will come out, Everything,'
'Then there's nothing for me,' Todd said. He uttered a dazed little laugh.
'Don't you see that?'
'But there is. Years will go by. As they pass, your hold on me will
become worth less and less, because no matter how important my life and
liberty remain to me, the Americans and-yes, even the Israelis-will have
less and less interest in taking them away.'
'Yeah? Then why don't they let that guy Speer go?'
'If the Americans had him-the Americans who let killers out with a spank
on the wrists -they would have let him go,' Dussander said. 'Are the
Americans going to allow the Israelis to extradite a ninety-year-old man so
they can hang him as they hung Eichmann? I think not. Not in a country
where they put photographs of firemen rescuing kittens from trees on the
front pages of city newspapers.
'No, your hold over me will weaken even as mine over you grows
stronger. No situation is static. And there will come a time-if I live long
enough-when I will decide what you know no longer matters. Then I will
destroy the document.'
'But so many things could happen to you in between! Accidents,
sickness, disease -' Dussander shrugged.' "There will be water if God wills
it, and we will find it if God wills it, and we will drink it if God wills it"
What happens is not up to us.' Todd looked at the old man for a long time-
for a very long time. There were flaws in Dussander's arguments-there had
to be. A way out, an escape hatch either for both of them or for Todd alone.
A way to cry it off times, guys, I hurt my foot, allee-allee-in-free. A black
knowledge of the years ahead trembled somewhere behind his eyes;
he could feel it there, waiting to be born as conscious thought.
Everywhere he went, everything he did
He thought of a cartoon character with an anvil suspended over its head.
By the time he graduated from high school, Dussander would be eighty, and
that would not be the end; by the time he collected his BA, Dussander
would be eighty-four and he would still feel that he wasn't old enough; he
would finish his master's thesis and graduate school the year Dussander
turned eighty-six and Dussander still might not feel safe. 'No,' Todd said
thickly. 'What you're saying I can't face that.'
'My boy,' Dussander said gently, and Todd heard for the first time and
with dawning horror the slight accent the old man had put on the first word.
'My boy you must' Todd stared at him his tongue swelling and thickening
in his mouth until it seemed it must fill his throat and choke him. Then he
wheeled and blundered out of the house. Dussander watched all of this with
no expression at all, and when the door had slammed shut and the boy's
running footsteps stopped, meaning that he had mounted his bike, he lit a
cigarette. There was, of course, no safe deposit box, no document But the
boy believed those things existed; he had believed utterly. He was safe. It
was ended.
But it was not ended.
That night they both dreamed of murder, and both of them awoke in
mingled terror and exhilaration.
Todd awoke with the now familiar stickiness on his lower belly.
Dussander, too old for such things, put on the Gestapo uniform and then lay
down again, waiting for his racing heart to slow. The uniform was cheaply
made and already beginning to fray.
In Dussander's dream he had finally reached the camp at the top of the
hill. The wide gate slid open for him and then rumbled shut on its steel
track once he was inside. Both the gate and the fence surrounding the camp
were electrified. His scrawny, naked pursuers threw themselves against the
fence -. wave after wave; Dussander had laughed at them and he had
strutted back and forth, his chest thrown out, his cap cocked at exactly the
right angle. The high, winey smell of burning flesh filled the black air, and
he had awakened in southern California thinking of jack-o'-lanterns and the
night when vampires seek the blue flame.
Two days before the Bowdens were scheduled to fly to Hawaii, Todd
went back to the abandoned trainyard where folks had once boarded trains
for San Francisco, Seattle, and Las Vegas; where other, older folks had once
boarded the trolley for Los Angeles.
It was nearly dusk when he got there. On the curve of freeway nine
hundred yards away, most of the cars were now mowing their parking
lights. Although it was warm, Todd was wearing a light jacket. Tucked into
his belt under it was a butcher-knife wrapped in an old hand-towel. He had
purchased the knife in a discount department store, one of the big ones
surrounded by acres of parking lot.
He looked under the platform where the wino had been the month before.
His mind turned and turned, but it turned on re-thing; everything inside him
at that moment was shades of black on black.
What he found was the same wino or possibly another; they all looked
pretty much the same.
"Hey!' Todd said. 'Hey! You want some money?'
The wino turned over, blinking. He saw Todd's wide, sunny grin and
began to grin back.
A moment later the butcher knife descended, all whicker-snicker and
chrome-white, slicker-slicing through his stubbly right cheek. Blood
sprayed. Todd could see the blade in the wino's opening mouth and then
its tip caught for a moment in the left corner of the wino's lips, pulling his
mouth into an insanely cockeyed grin. Then it was the knife that was
making the grin; he was carving the wino like a Halloween pumpkin.
He stabbed the wino thirty-seven times. He kept count. Thirty-seven,
counting the first strike, which went through the wino's cheek and then
turned his tentative smile into a great grisly grin. The wino stopped trying
to scream after the fourth stroke. He stopped trying to scramble away from
Todd after the sixth. Todd then crawled all the way under the platform and
finished the job.
On his way home he threw the knife into the river. His pants were
bloodstained. He tossed them into the washing machine and set it to wash
cold. There were still faint stains on the pants when they came out, but they
didn't concern Todd. They would fade in time.
He found the next day that he could barely lift his right arm to the level
of his shoulder.
He told his father he must have strained it throwing pepper with some of
the guys in the park.
'It'll get better in Hawaii,' Dick Bowden said, ruffling Todd's hair, and it
did; by the time they came home, it was as good as new.
13
It was July again.
Dussander, carefully dressed in one of his three suits (not his best), was
standing at the bus stop and waiting for the last local of the day to take him
home. It was 10.45 p. m. He had been to a film, a light and frothy comedy
that he had enjoyed a great deal. He had been in a fine mood ever since the
morning mail. There had been a postcard from the boy, a glossy colour
photo of Waikiki Beach with bone-white highrise hotels standing in the
background. There was a brief message on the reverse.
Dear Mr Denker,
Boy this sure is some place. I've been swimming every day. My dad
caught a big fish and my mom is catching up on her reading (joke).
Tomorrow we're going to a volcano. I'll try not to fall in! Hope you're okay.
Stay healthy, Todd
He was still smiling faintly at the significance of that last when a hand
touched his elbow.
'Mister?'
'Yes?'
He turned, on his guard-even in Santa Donato, muggers were not
unknown-and then winced at the aroma. It seemed to be a combination of
beer, halitosis, dried sweat, and possibly Musterole. It was a bum in baggy
pants. He-it -wore a flannel shirt and very old Keds that were currently
being held together with dirty bands of adhesive tape. The face looming
above this motley costume looked like the death of God.
'You got an extra dime, mister? I gotta get to LA, me. Got a job
offertunity. I need just a dime more for the express bus. I wudn't ask if it
wasn't a big chance for me.'
Dussander had begun to frown, but now his smile reasserted itself.
'Is it really a bus ride you wish?'
The wino smiled sickly, not understanding.
'Suppose you ride the bus home with me,' Dussander proposed. 'I can
offer you a drink, a meal, a bath, and a bed.. All I ask in return is a little
conversation. I am an old man. I live alone. Company is sometimes very
welcome.'
The drunk's smile abruptly grew more healthy as the situation clarified
itself. Here was a well-to-do old faggot with a taste for slumming.
'All by yourself! Bitch, innit?'
Dussander answered the broad, insinuating grin with a polite smile. 'I
only ask that you sit away from me on the bus. You smell rather strongly.'
'Maybe you don't want me stinking up your place, then,' the drunk said
with sudden, tipsy dignity.
'Come, the bus will be here in a minute. Get off one stop after I do and
then walk back two blocks. I'll wait for you on the corner. In the morning I
will see what I can spare.
Perhaps two dollars.'
'Maybe even five,' the drunk said brightly. His dignity, tipsy or otherwise,
had been forgotten.
'Perhaps, perhaps,' Dussander said impatiently. He could now hear the
low diesel drone of the approaching bus. He pressed a quarter, the correct
bus fare, into the bum's grimy hand and strolled a few paces away without
looking back.
The bum stood undecided as the headlights of the local swept over the
rise. He was still standing and frowning down at the quarter when the old
faggot got on the bus without looking back. The bum began to walk away
and then-at the last second-he reversed direction and boarded the bus just
before the doors folded closed. He put the quarter into the fare-box with the
expression of a man putting a hundred dollars down on a long shot. He
passed Dussander without doing more than glancing at him and sat at the
back of the bus. He dozed off a little, and when he woke up, the rich old
faggot was gone. He got off at the next stop, not knowing if it was the right
one or not, and not really caring. He walked back two blocks and saw a dim
shape under the streetlight. It was the old faggot, all right. The faggot was
watching him approach, and he was standing as if at attention.
For just a moment the bum felt a chill of apprehension, an urge to just
turn away and forget the whole thing.
Then the old man was gripping him by the arm and his grip was
surprisingly firm. 'Good,' the old man said. 'I'm very glad you came. My
house is down here. It's not far.'
'Maybe even ten,' the bum said, allowing himself to be led. 'Maybe even
ten,' the old faggot agreed, and then laughed. 'Who knows?' The Bi-
Centennial year arrived.
Todd came by to see Dussander half a dozen times between his return
from Hawaii in the summer of 1975 and the trip he and his parents took to
Rome just as all the drum-thumping, flag-waving, and Tall Ships-watching
was approaching its climax. Todd got special permission to leave school
early, on 1 June, and they were back three days before the Bi-Centennial
4th.
These visits to Dussander were low-key and in no way unpleasant; the
two of them found they could pass the time civilly enough. They spoke
more in silences than they did in words, and their actual conversations
would have put an FBI agent to sleep. Todd told the old man that he had
been seeing a girl named Angela Farrow off and on. He wasn't nuts about
her, but she was the daughter of one of his mother's friends. The old man
told Todd he had taken up braiding rugs because he had read such an
activity was good for arthritis. He showed Todd several samples of his
work, and Todd dutifully admired them. The boy had grown quite a bit, had
he not? (Well, two inches.) Had Dussander given up smoking? (No, but he
had been forced to cut down; they made him cough too much NOW.) How
had his schoolwork been? (Challenging but exciting; he had made all As
and Bs, had gone to the state finals with his Science Fair project on solar
power, and was now thinking of majoring in anthropology instead of history
when he got to college.) Who was mowing Dussander's lawn this year?
(Randy Chambers from just down the street-a good boy, but rather fat and
slow.)
During that year Dussander had put an end to three winos in his kitchen.
He had been approached at the downtown bus stop some twenty times, had
made the drink-dinner-bath-and-bed offer seven times. He had been turned
down twice, and on two other occasions the winos had simply walked off
with the quarters Dussander gave them for the fare-box. After some
thought, he had worked out a way around this; he simply bought a bus-pass.
They were two dollars and fifty cents, good for fifteen rides, and non-
negotiable at the local liquor stores.
On very warm days just lately, Dussander had noticed an unpleasant
smell drifting up from his cellar. He kept his doors and windows firmly shut
on these days. Todd Bowden had found a wino sleeping it off in an
abandoned drainage culvert behind a vacant lot on Cienaga Way-this had
been in December, during the Christmas vacation. He had stood there for
some time, hands stuffed into his pockets, looking at the wino and
trembling. He had returned to the lot six times over a period of five weeks,
always wearing his light jacket, zipped halfway up to conceal the Craftsman
hammer tucked into his belt. At last he had come upon the wino again-that
one or some other, and who really gave a fuck-on the first day of March. He
had begun with the hammer end of the tool, and then at some point (he
didn't really remember when; everything had been swimming in a red haze)
he had switched to the claw end, obliterating the wino's face. For Kurt
Dussander, the winos were a half-cynical propitiation of gods he had finally
recognized or re-recognized. And the winos were fun. They made him feel
alive. He was beginning to feel that the years he had spent in Santa Donato-
the years before the boy had turned up on his doorstep with his big blue
eyes and his wide American grin -had been years spent being old before his
time. He had been only sixty-eight when he came here. And he felt much
younger than that now.
The idea of propitiating gods would have startled Todd at first but it
might have gained eventual acceptance. After stabbing the wino under the
train platform, he had expected his nightmares to intensify to perhaps even
drive him crazy. He had expected waves of paralyzing guilt that might well
end with a blurted confession or the taking of his own life.
Instead of any of those things, he had gone to Hawaii with his parents
and enjoyed the best vacation of his life.
He had begun high school last September feeling oddly new and
refreshed, as if a different person had jumped into his Todd Bowden skin.
Things that had made no particular impression on him since earliest
childhood-the sunlight just after dawn, the look of the ocean off the Fish
Pier, the sight of people hurrying on a downtown street at just that moment
of dusk when the streetlights come on-these things now imprinted
themselves on his mind again in a series of bright cameos, in images so
clear they seemed electroplated. He tasted life on his tongue like a draught
of wine straight from the bottle. After he had seen the stewbum in the
culvert, the nightmares had begun again. The most common one involved
the wino he had stabbed to death in the abandoned trainyards. Home from
school, he burst into the house, a cheery Hi, Monica-baby! on his lips. It
died there as he saw the dead wino in the raised breakfast nook. He was
sitting slumped over their butcher-block table in his puke-smelling shirt and
pants. Blood had streaked across the bright tiled floor; it was drying on the
stainless steel counters. There were bloody handprints on the natural pine
cupboards.
Clipped to the note-board by the fridge was a message from his mother:
Todd-Gone to the store. Back by 3.30. The hands of the stylish sunburst
clock over the Jenn-Aire range stood at 3.20 and the drunk was sprawled
dead up there in the nook like some horrid oozing relic from the subcellar
of a junkshop and there was blood everywhere, and Todd began trying to
clean it up, wiping every exposed surface, all the time screaming at the dead
wino that he had to go, had to leave him alone, and the wino just lolled
there and stayed dead, grinning up at the ceiling, and the freshets of blood
kept pouring from the stab-wounds in his dirty skin. Todd grabbed the O-
Cedar mop from the closet and began to slide it madly back and forth across
the floor, aware that he was not really getting the blood up but only diluting
it, spreading it around, but unable to stop. And just as he heard his mother's
Town and Country wagon turn into the driveway, he realized the wino was
Dussander. He woke from these dreams sweating and gasping, clutching
double handfuls of the bedclothes.
But after he finally found the wino in the culvert again -that wino or
some other-and used the hammer on him, these dreams went away. He
supposed he might have to kill again, and maybe more than once. It was too
bad, but of course their time of usefulness as human creatures was over.
Except their usefulness to Todd, of course. And Todd, like everyone else he
knew, was only tailoring his lifestyle to fit his own particular needs as he
grew older. Really, he was no different than anybody. You had to make your
own way in the world; if you were going to get along, you had to do it by
yourself.
15
In the fall of his junior year, Todd played varsity tailback for the Santa
Donate Cougars and was named All-Conference. And in the second quarter
of that year, the quarter which ended in late January of 1977, he won the
American Legion Patriotic Essay Contest This contest was open to all city
high school students who were taking American history courses. Todd's
piece was called 'An American's Responsibility'. During the baseball season
in that confused year (the Shah of Iran had been ousted and gasoline prices
were on the rise again) he was the school's star pitcher, winning four and
losing none. His batting average was.361. At the awards assembly in June
he was named Athlete of the Year and given a plaque by Coach Haines
(Coach Haines, who had once taken him aside and told him to keep
practising his curve
'because none of these niggers can throw a curve-ball, Bowden, not one
of them'). Monica Bowden burst into tears when Todd called her from
school and told her he was going to get the award. Dick Bowden strutted
around his office for two weeks following the ceremony, trying not to boast.
That summer they rented a cabin in Big Sur and stayed there for two weeks
and Todd snorkled his brains out. During that same year Todd killed four
derelicts. He stabbed two of them and bludgeoned two of them. He had
taken to wearing two pairs of pants on what he now acknowledged to be
hunting expeditions. Sometimes he rode the city buses, looking for likely
spots. The best two, he found, were the Santo Donato Mission for the
Indigent on Douglas Street, and around the corner from the Salvation Army
on Euclid. He would walk slowly through both of these neighbourhoods,
waiting to be panhandled. When a wino approached him, Todd would tell
him that he, Todd, wanted a bottle of whiskey, and if the wino would buy it,
Todd would share the bottle. He knew a place, he said, where they could go.
It was a different place every time, of course. He resisted a strong urge to go
back either to the trainyards or to the culvert behind the vacant lot on
Cienaga Way. Revisiting the scene of a previous crime would have been
unwise. During the same year Dussander smoked sparingly, drank Ancient
Age bourbon, and watched TV. Todd came by once in a while, but their
conversations became increasingly arid. They were growing apart
Dussander celebrated his seventy-eighth birthday that year, which was also
the year Todd turned sixteen. Dussander remarked that sixteen was the best
year of a young man's life, forty-one the best year of a middle-aged man's,
and seventy-eight the best of an old man's. Todd nodded politely. Dussander
had been quite drunk and cackled in a way that made Todd distinctly
uneasy.
Dussander had dispatched two winos during Todd's academic years of
197677. The second had been livelier than he looked; even after Dussander
had gotten the man soddenly drunk he had tottered around the kitchen with
the haft of a steak-knife jutting from the base of his neck, gushing blood
down the front of his shirt and onto the floor. The wino had re-discovered
the front hall after two staggering circuits of the kitchen and had almost
escaped the house.
Dussander had stood in the kitchen, eyes wide with shocked unbelief,
watching the wino grunt and puff his way towards the door, rebounding
from one side of the hall to the other and knocking cheap Currier & Ives
reproductions to the floor. His paralysis had not broken until the wino was
actually groping for the doorknob. Then Dussander had bolted across the
room, jerked open the utility drawer, and pulled out his meat-fork. He ran
down the hall with the meat-fork held out in front of him and drove it into
the wine's back.
Dussander had stood over him, panting, his old heart racing in a
frightening way racing like that of a heart-attack victim on that Saturday
night TV programme he enjoyed, Emergency. But at last it had slowed back
into a normal rhythm and he knew he was going to be all right.
There had been a great deal of blood to clean up.
That had been four months ago, and since then he had not made his offer
at the downtown bus-stop. He was frightened of the way he had almost
bungled the last one but when he remembered the way he had handled
things at the last moment, pride rose in his heart. In the end the wino had
never made it out the door, and that was the important thing.
In the fall of 1977, during the first quarter of his senior year, Todd joined
the rifle club. By June of 1978 he had qualified as a marksman. He made
All-Conference in football again, won five and lost one during the baseball
season (the loss coming as the result of two errors and one unearned run),
and made the third highest Merit Scholarship score in the school's history.
He applied at Berkeley and was promptly accepted. By April he knew he
would either be valedictorian or salutatorian on graduation night. He very
badly wanted to be valedictorian.
During the latter half of his senior year, an odd impulse came on him-one
which was as frightening to Todd as it was irrational. He seemed to be
clearly and firmly in control of it, and that at least was comforting, but that
such a thought should have occurred at all was scary. He had made an
arrangement with life. He had worked things out. His life was much like his
mother's bright and sunshiny kitchen, where all the surfaces were dressed in
chrome, Formica, or stainless steel- a place where everything worked when
you pressed the buttons. There were deep and dark cupboards in this
kitchen, of course, but many things could be stored in them and their doors
still be closed. This new impulse reminded him of the dream in which he
had come home to discover the dead and bleeding wino in his mother's
clean, well-lighted place. It was as if, in the bright and careful arrangement
he had made, in that a-place-for-everything-and-everything-in-its-place
kitchen of his mind, a dark and bloody intruder now lurched and shambled,
looking for a place to die conspicuously
A quarter of a mile from the Bowden house was the freeway, running
eight lanes wide. A steep and brushy bank led down to it. There was plenty
of good cover on the bank. His father had given him a Winchester.30-.30
for Christmas, and it had a removable telescopic sight. During rush hour,
when all eight lanes were jammed, he could pick a spot on that bank and
why, he could easily
Do what?
Commit suicide
Destroy everything he had worked for these last five years?
Say what!
No sir, no ma'am, no way.
It is, as they say, to laugh.
Sure it was but the impulse remained.
One Saturday a few weeks before his high school graduation, Todd cased
the.30-.30 after carefully emptying the magazine. He put the rifle in the
back seat of his father's new toy-a used Porsche. He drove to the spot where
the brushy dope dropped steeply down to the freeway. His mother and
father had taken the station wagon and had driven to LA for the weekend.
Dick, now a full partner, would be holding discussions with the Hyatt
people about a new Reno hotel.
Todd's heart bumped in his chest and his mouth was full of sour, electric
spit as he worked his way down the grade with the cased rifle in his arms.
He came to a fallen tree and sat cross-legged behind it. He uncased the rifle
and laid it on the dead tree's smooth trunk. A branch jutting off at an angle
made a nice rest for the barrel. He snugged the buttplate into the hollow of
his right shoulder and peered into the telescopic sight.
Stupid! his mind screamed at him. Boy, this is really stupid! If someone
sees you, it's not going to matter if the gun's loaded or not! You'll get in
plenty of trouble, maybe even end up with some Chippie shooting at you!
It was midmorning and the Saturday traffic was light. He settled the
crosshairs on a woman behind the wheel of a blue Toyota. The woman's
window was half open and the round collar of her sleeveless blouse was
fluttering. Todd centred the crosshairs on her temple and dry-fired. It was
bad for the firing-pin, but what the fuck.
'Pow,' he whispered as the Toyota disappeared beneath the underpass half
a mile up from the slope where Todd sat. He swallowed around a lump that
tasted like a stuck-together mass of pennies.
Here came a man behind the wheel of a Subaru Brat pickup truck. This
man had a scuzzy-looking grey beard and was wearing a San Diego Padres
baseball hat.
'You're you're the dirty rat the dirty rat that shot my brudduh,' Todd
whispered, giggling a little, and dry-fired the.30.30 again.
He shot at five others, the impotent snap of the hammer spoiling the
illusion at the end of each 'kill'. Then he cased the rifle again. He carried it
back up the slope, bending low to keep from being seen. He put it into the
back of the Porsche. There was a dry hot pounding in his temples. He drove
home. Went up to his room. Masturbated.
17
The stewbum was wearing a ragged, unravelling reindeer sweater that
looked so startling it almost seemed surreal here-southern California. He
also wore seaman's issue bluejeans which were out at the knees, showing
white, hairy flesh and a number of peeling scabs. He raised the jelly glass-
Fred and Wilma, Barney and Betty dancing around the rim in what might
have been some grotesque fertility rite-and tossed off the knock of Ancient
Age at a gulp. He smacked his lips for the last time in this world.
'Mister, that hits the old spot. I don't mind saying so.'
'I always enjoy a drink in the evening,' Dussander agreed from behind
him, and then rammed the butcher knife into the stewbum's neck. There was
the sound of ripping gristle, a sound like a drumstick being torn
enthusiastically from a freshly roasted chicken. The jelly glass fell from the
stewbum's hand and onto the table. It rolled towards the edge, its movement
enhancing the illusion that the cartoon characters on it were dancing.
The stewbum threw his head back and tried to scream. Nothing came out
but a hideous whistling sound. His eyes widened, widened and then his
head thumped soggily onto the red and white oilcloth check that covered
Dussander's kitchen table. The stewbum's upper plate slithered halfway out
of his mouth like a semi-detachable grin. Dussander yanked the knife free-
he had to use both hands to do it-and crossed to the kitchen sink. It was
filled with hot water, Lemon Fresh Joy, the dirty supper dishes. The knife
disappeared into a billow of citrus-smelling suds like a very small fighter
plane diving into a cloud.
He crossed to the table again and paused there, resting one hand on the
dead stewbum's shoulder while a spasm of coughing rattled through him.
He took his handkerchief from his back pocket and spat yellowish-brown
phlegm into it. He had been smoking too much lately. He always did when
he was making up his mind to do another one. But this one had gone
smoothly; really very smoothly. He had been afraid after the mess he had
made with the last one that he might be tempting fate sorely to try it again.
Now, if he hurried, he would still be able to watch the second half of
Lawrence Welk. He bustled across the kitchen, opened the cellar door, and
turned on the light switch. He went back to the sink and got the package of
green plastic garbage bags from the cupboard beneath. He shook one out as
he walked back to the slumped wino. Blood had run across the table cloth in
all directions. It had puddled in the wino's lap and on the hilly, faded
linoleum. It would be on the chair, too, but all of those things would clean
up. Dussander grabbed the stewbum by the hair and yanked his head up. It
came with boneless ease, and a moment later the wino was lolling
backwards, like a man about to get a pre-haircut shampoo. Dussander
pulled the garbage bag down over the wino's head, over his shoulders, and
down his arms to the elbows. That was as far as it would go. He unbuckled
his late guest's belt and pulled it free of the fraying belt-loops. He wrapped
the belt around the garbage bag two or three inches above the elbows and
buckled it tight. Plastic rustled. Dussander began to hum 'Lift Marlene'
under his breath. The wino's feet were clad in scuffed and dirty Hush
Puppies. They made a limp V on the floor as Dussander seized the belt and
dragged the corpse towards the cellar door. Something white tumbled out of
the plastic bag and clicked on the floor. It was the stewbum's upper plate,
Dussander saw. He picked it up and stuffed it into one of the wino's front
pockets.
He laid the wino down in the cellar doorway with his head now lolling
backwards onto the second stair-level. Dussander climbed around the body
and gave it three healthy kicks. The body moved slightly on the first two,
and the third sent it slithering bonelessly down the stairs. Halfway down the
feet flew up over the head and the body executed an acrobatic roll. It belly-
whopped onto the packed dirt of the cellar floor with a solid thud.
One Hush Puppy flew off, and Dussander made a mental note to pick it
up.
He went down the stairs, skirted the body, and approached his toolbench.
To the left of the bench a spade, a rake, and a hoe leaned against the wall in
a neat rank. Dussander selected the spade. A little exercise was good for an
old man. A little exercise could make you feel young.
The smell down here was not good, but it didn't bother him much. He
limed the place once a month (once every three days after he had 'done' one
of his winos) and he had gotten a fan which he ran upstairs to keep the
smell from permeating the house on very warm still days. Josef Kramer, he
remembered, had been fond of saying that the dead speak, but we hear them
with our noses.
Dussander picked a spot in the cellar's north corner and went to work.
The dimensions of the grave were two and half feet by six feet. He had
gotten to a depth of two feet, half deep enough, when the first paralyzing
pain struck him in the chest like a shotgun blast He straightened up, eyes
flaring wide. Then the pain rolled down his arm unbelievable pain, as if an
invisible hand had seized all the blood-vessels in there and was now pulling
them. He watched the spade tumble sideways and felt his knees buckle. For
one horrible moment he felt sure that he was going to fall into the grave
himself.
Somehow he staggered backwards three paces and sat down on his
workbench with a plop. There was an expression of stupid surprise on his
face-he could feel it-and he thought he must look like one of those silent
movie comedians after he's been hit by the swinging door or stepped in the
cow patty. He put his head down between his knees and gasped.
Fifteen minutes crawled by. The pain had begun to abate somewhat, but
he did not believe he would be able to stand. For the first time he
understood all the truths of old age which he had been spared until now. He
was terrified almost to the point of whimpering.
Death had brushed by him in this dank smelly cellar; it had touched
Dussander with the hem of its robe. It might be back for him yet But he
would not die down here; not if he could help it.
He got up, hands still crossed on his chest, as if to hold the fragile
machinery together. He staggered across the open space between the
workbench and the stairs. His left foot tripped over the dead wino's
outstretched leg and he went to his knees with a small cry.
There was a sullen flare of pain in his chest. He looked up the stairs-the
steep, steep stairs. Twelve of them. The square of light at the top was
mockingly distant.
"Ein,' Kurt Dussander said, and pulled himself grimly up onto the first
stair-
level.
'Zwei. Drei. Vier.'
It took him twenty minutes to reach the linoleum floor of the kitchen.
Twice, on the stairs, the pain had threatened to come back, and both times
Dussander had waited with his eyes closed to see what would happen,
perfectly aware that if it came back as strongly as it had come upon him
down there, he would probably die. Both times the pain had faded away
again.
He crawled across the kitchen floor to the table, avoiding the pools and
streaks of blood, which were now congealing. He got the bottle of Ancient
Age, took a swallow, and closed his eyes. Something that had been cinched
tight in his chest seemed to loosen a little. The pain faded a bit more. After
another five minutes he began to work his way slowly down the hall. His
telephone sat on a small table halfway down.
It was quarter past nine when the phone rang in the Bowden house. Todd
was sitting cross-legged on the couch, going over his notes for the trig final.
Trig was a bitch for him, as all maths were and probably always would be.
His father was seated across the room, going through the chequebook stubs
with a portable calculator on his lap and a mildly disbelieving expression on
his face. Monica, closest to the phone, was watching the James Bond movie
Todd had taped off HBO two evenings before.
'Hello?' She listened. A faint frown touched her face and she held the
handset out to Todd. 'It's Mr Denker. He sounds excited about something.
Or upset.'
Todd's heart leaped into his throat, but his expression hardly changed.
'Really?' He went to the phone and took it from her. 'Hi, Mr Denker.'
Dussander's voice was hoarse and short 'Come over right away, boy. I've
had a heart attack. Quite a bad one, I think.'
'Gee,' Todd said, trying to collect his flying thoughts, to see around the
fear that now bulked huge in his own mind. That's interesting, all right, but
it's pretty late and I was studying-'
'I understand that you cannot talk,' Dussander said in that harsh, almost
barking voice. 'But you can listen. I cannot call an ambulance or dial 222,
boy at least not yet. There is a mess here. I need help and that means you
need help.'
'Well if you put it that way' Todd's heartbeat had -reached a hundred
and twenty beats a minute, but his face was calm, almost serene. Hadn't he
known all along that a night like this would come? Yes, of course he had.
Tell your parents I've had a letter,' Dussander said. 'An important letter.
You understand?'
'Yeah, okay,' Todd said.
'Now we see, boy. We see what you are made of.'
'Sure,' Todd said. He suddenly became aware that his -mother was
watching him instead of the movie, and he forced a stiff grin onto his face.
'Bye.'
Dussander was saying something else now, but Todd hung up on it 'I'm
going over to Mr Denker's for a while,' he said, speaking to both of them
but looking at his mother-that faint expression of concern was still on her
face. 'Can I pick up anything for either of you at the store?'
'Pipe cleaners for me and a small package of fiscal -responsibility for
your mother,' Dick said.
'Very funny,' Monica said. Todd, is Mr Denker -'
'What in the name of God did you get at Fielding's?' Dick interrupted.
That knick-knack shelf in the closet. I told you that. There's nothing
wrong with Mr Denker, is there, Todd? He sounded a little strange.'
'There really are such things as knick-knack shelves? I thought those
crazy women who write British mysteries made them up so there would
always be a place where the killer could find a blunt instrument'
'Dick, can I get a word in edgeways?'
'Sure. Be my guest But for the closet?'
'He's okay, I guess,' Todd said. He put on his leather jacket and zipped it
up. 'But he was excited. He got a letter from a nephew of his in Hamburg or
Dusseldorf or someplace. He hasn't heard from any of his people in years,
and now he's got this letter and his eyes aren't good enough for him to read
it'
'Well isn't that a bitch,' Dick said. 'Go on, Todd. Get over there and ease
the man's mind.'
'I thought he had someone to read to him,' Monica said. 'A new boy.'
'He does,' Todd said, suddenly hating his mother, hating the half-formed
intuition he saw swimming in her eyes. 'Maybe he wasn't home, or maybe
he couldn't come over this late.'
'Oh. Well go on, then. But be careful.'
'I will. You don't need anything at the store?'
'No. How's your studying for that calculus final going?'
'It's trig,' Todd said. 'Okay, I guess. I was just getting ready to call it a
night.' This was a rather large lie.
'You want to take the Porsche?' Dick asked.
'No, I'll ride my bike.' He wanted the extra five minutes to collect his
thoughts and get his emotions under control-to try, at least. And in his
present state, he would probably drive the Porsche into a telephone pole.
'Strap your reflector-patch on your knee,' Monica said, 'and tell Mr
Denker hello for us.'
'Okay.'
That doubt was still in his mother's eyes but it was less evident now. He
blew her a kiss and then went out to the garage where his bike- a racing-
style German bike rather than a Schwinn now-was parked. His heart was
still racing in his chest, and he felt a mad urge to take the.30-.30 back into
the house and shoot both of his parents and then go down to the slope
overlooking the freeway. No more Apt Pupil 241 worrying about
Dussander. No more bad dreams, no more winos. He would shoot and shoot
and shoot, only saving one bullet back for the end.
Then reason came back to him and he rode away towards Dussander's,
his reflector-patch revolving up and down just above his knee, his long
blond hair streaming back from his brow.
'Holy Christ!' Todd nearly screamed.
He was standing in the kitchen door. Dussander was damped on his
elbows, his china cup between them. Large drops of sweat stood out on his
forehead. But it
was not Dossander Todd was looking at It was the blood. There seemed
to be blood everywhere-it was puddled on the table, an the empty kitchen
chair, on the floor.
'Where are you bleeding?' Todd shouted, at last getting his frozen feet to
move again-it seemed to him that he had been standing in the doorway for
at least a thousand years. This is the end, he was thinking, this is the
absolute end of everything. The balloon is going up high, baby, all the way
to the sky, baby, and it's toot-toot-tootsie, goodbye. All the same, he was
careful not to step in any of the blood. 'I thought you said you had a fucking
heart attack!'
'It's not my blood,' Dussander muttered. 'What?' Todd stopped. 'What did
you
say?'
'Go downstairs. You will see what has to be done.'
'What the hell is this?' Todd asked. A sudden terrible idea -had come into
his head. 'Don't waste our time, boy. I think you will not be too surprised at
what you find downstairs. I think you have had experience in such matters
as the one in my cellar. Firsthand experience.'
Todd looked at him, unbelieving, for another moment, and then he
plunged down the cellar stairs two by two. His first look in the feeble
yellow glow of the basement's only light made him think that Dussander
had pushed a bag of garbage down there. Then he saw the protruding legs,
and the dirty hands held down at the sides by the cinched belt.
'Holy Christ,' he repeated, but this time the words had no force at all-they
emerged in a slight, skeletal whisper.
He pressed the back of his right hand against lips that were as dry as
sandpaper. He closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them
again, he felt in control of himself at last.
Todd started moving.
He saw the spade-handle protruding from a shallow hole in the far corner
and understood at once what Dussander had being doing when his ticker
had seized up. A moment later he became fully aware of the cellar's fetid
aroma-a smell like rotting tomatoes. He had smelled it before, but upstairs it
was much fainter and, of course, he hadn't been here very often over the
last couple of years. Now he understood exactly what that smell meant and
for several moments he had to struggle with his gorge. A series of choked
gagging sounds, muffled by the hand he had clapped over his mouth and
nose, came from him.
Little by little he got control of himself again.
He seized the wino's legs and dragged him across to the edge of the hole.
He dropped them, skidded sweat from his forehead with the heel of his left
hand, and stood absolutely still for a moment, thinking harder than he ever
had in his life.
Then he seized the spade and began to deepen the hole. When it was five
feet deep, he got out and shoved the derelict's body in with his foot Todd
stood at the edge of the grave, looking down. Tattered bluejeans. Filthy,
scab-encrusted hands. It was a stewbum, all right The irony was almost
funny. So funny a person could scream with laughter.
He ran back upstairs.
'How are you?' he asked Dussander.
'Ill be all right Have you taken care of it?'
'I'm doing it, okay?'
'Be quick. There's still up here.'
'I'd like to find some pigs and feed you to them,' Todd said, and went
back down the cellar before Dussander could reply.
He had almost completely covered the wino when he began to think there
was something wrong. He stared into the grave, grasping the spade's handle
with one hand. The wino's legs stuck partway out of the mound of dirt, as
did the tips of his feet-one old shoe, possibly a Hush Puppy, and one filthy
athletic sock that might actually have been white around the time that Taft
was President.
One Hush Puppy? One?
Todd half-ran back around the furnace to the foot of the stairs. He
glanced around wildly.
A headache was beginning to thud against his temples, dull drillbits
trying to work their way out. He spotted the old shoe five feet away,
overturned in the shadow of some abandoned shelving. Todd grabbed it, ran
back to the grave with it, and threw it in. Then he started to shovel again.
He covered the shoe, the legs, everything.
When all the dirt was back in the hole, he slammed the spade down
repeatedly to tamp it Then he grabbed the rake and ran it back and forth,
trying to disguise the fact the earth here had been recently turned. Not much
use; without good camouflage, a hole that has been recently dug and then
filled in always looks like a hole that has been recently dug and then filled
in. Still, no one would have any occasion to come down here, would they?
He and Dussander would damn well have to hope not.
Todd ran back upstairs. He was starting to pant.
Dussander's elbows had spread wide and his head had sagged down to
the table. His eyes were closed, the lids a shiny purple-the colour of asters
'Dussander!' Todd shouted. There was a hot, juicy taste in his mouth-the
taste of fear mixed with adrenalin and pulsing hot blood. 'Don't you dare die
on me, you old fuck!'
'Keep your voice down,' Dussander said without opening ins eyes. 'You'll
have everyone on the block over here.'
'Where's your cleaner? Lestoil Top Job something like that. And rags.
I need rags.'
'All that is under the sink.'
A lot of the blood had now dried on. Dussander raised his head and
watched as Todd crawled across the floor, scrubbing first at the puddle on
the linoleum and then at the drips that had straggled down the legs of the
chair the wino had been sitting in. The boy was biting compulsively at his
lips, champing at them, almost, like a horse at a bit. At last the job was
finished. The astringent smell of cleaner filled the room.
'There is a box of old rags under the stairs,' Dussander said. 'Put those
bloody ones on the bottom. Don't forget to wash your hands.'
'I don't need your advice. You got me into this.'
'Did I? I must say you took hold well.' For a moment the old mockery
was in Dussander's voice, and then a bitter grimace pulled his face into a
new shape. 'Hurry.'
Todd took care of the rags, then hurried up the cellar stairs for the last
time. He looked nervously down the stairs for a moment, then snapped off
the light and closed the door.
He went to the sink, rolled up his sleeves, and washed in the hottest water
he could stand.
He plunged his hands into the suds and came up holding the butcher
knife Dussander had used.
'I'd like to cut your throat with this,' Todd said grimly.
'Yes, and then feed me to the pigs. I have no doubt of it'
Todd rinsed the knife, dried it, and put it away. He did the rest of the
dishes quickly, let the water out, and rinsed the sink. He looked at the clock
as he dried his hands and saw it was twenty past ten.
He went to the phone in the hallway, picked up the receiver, and looked
at it thoughtfully.
The idea that he had forgotten something-something as potentially
damning as the wino's shoe-nagged unpleasantly at his mind. What? He
didn't know. If not for the headache, he might be able to get it The triple-
damned headache. It wasn't like him to forget things, and it was scary.
He dialled 222 and after a single ring, a voice answered: This is Santa
Donato MED-Q.
Do you have a medical problem?'
'My name is Todd Bowden. I'm at 963 Claremont Lane. I need an
ambulance.'
'What's the problem, son?'
'It's my friend, Mr D-' He bit down on his lip so hard that it squirted
blood, and for a moment he was lost, drowning in the pulses of pain from
his head. Dussander. He had almost given this anonymous MED-Q voice
Dussander's real name.
"Calm down, son,' the voice said. Take it slow and you'll be fine.'
'My friend Mr Denker,' Todd said. 'I think he's had a heart attack.'
'His symptoms?'
Todd began to give them, but the receptionist had heard enough as soon
as Todd described the chest pain that had migrated to the left arm. He told
Todd the ambulance would arrive in ten to twenty minutes, depending on
the traffic. Todd hung up and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
'Did you get it?' Dussander called weakly.
'Yes!' Todd screamed. 'Yes, I got it! Yes goddammit yes! Yes yes yes!
Just shut up?'
He pressed his hands even harder against his eyes, creating first senseless
starflashes of light and then a bright field of red. Get hold of yourself, Todd-
baby. Get down, get funky, get cool. Dig it.
He opened his eyes and picked up the telephone again. Now the hard
part. Now it was time to call home.
'Hello?' Monica's soft, cultured voice in his ear. For a moment-just a
moment-he saw himself slamming the muzzle of the.30-.30 into her nose
and pulling the trigger into the first flow of blood.
'It's Todd, mommy. Let me talk to dad, quick.'
He didn't call her mommy anymore. He knew she would get that signal
quicker than anything else, and she did. 'What's the matter? Is something
wrong, Todd?'
'Just let me talk to him!'
'But what -'
The phone rattled and clinked. He heard his mother saying something to
his father. Todd got ready.
Todd? What's the problem?'
'It's Mr Denker, daddy. He it's a heart attack, I think. I'm pretty sure it
is.'
'Jesus!' His father's voice lagged away for a moment and Todd heard him
repeating the information to his wife. Then he was back. 'He's still alive? As
far as you can tell?'
'He's alive. Conscious.'
'All right, thank God for that Call an ambulance.'
'I just did.'
'222?'
'Yes.'
'Good boy. How bad is he, can you tell?'
(not fucking bad enough!)
'I don't know, dad. They said the ambulance would be here soon, but I'm
sorta scared.
Can you come over and wait with me?'
'You bet Give me four minutes.'
Todd could hear his mother saying something else as his father hung up,
breaking the connection. Todd replaced the receiver on his end.
Four minutes.
Four minutes to do anything that had been left undone. Four minutes to
remember whatever it was that had been forgotten. Or had he forgotten
anything? Maybe it was just nerves. God, he wished he hadn't had to call
his father. But it was the natural thing to do, wasn't it? Sure. Was there some
natural thing that he hadn 't done? Something -?
'Oh, you shit-for-brains!' he suddenly moaned, and bolted back into the
kitchen.
Dussander's head lay on the table, his eyes half-open, sluggish.
'Dussander!' Todd cried. He shook Dussander roughly, and the old man
groaned. 'Wake up! Wake up, you stinking old bastard!'
'What? Is it the ambulance?'
The letter! My father is coming over, he'll be here in no time. Where's the
fucking letter?"
'What what letter?'
'You told me to tell them you got an important letter. I said' His heart
sank. 'I said it came from overseas from Germany. Christ!' Todd ran his
hands through his hair.
'A letter.' Dussander raised his head with slow difficulty. His seamed
cheeks were an unhealthy yellowish-white, his lips blue. 'From Willi, I
think. Willi Frankel. Dear dear Willi.'
Todd looked at his watch and saw that already two minutes had passed
since he had hung up the phone. His father would not, could not make it
from their house to Dussander's in four minutes, but he could do it damn
fast in the Porsche. Fast, that was it. Everything was moving too fast. And
there was still something wrong here; he felt it. But there was no time to
stop and hunt around for the loophole.
'Yes, okay, I was reading it to you, and you got excited and had this heart
attack. Good.
Where is it?'
Dussander looked at him blankly.
'The letter! Where is it?'
'What letter?' Dussander asked vacantly, and Todd's lands itched to
throttle the drunken old monster.
The one I was reading to you! The one from Willi What's-his-face!
Where is
it?'
They both looked at the table, as if expecting to see the letter materialize
there.
'Upstairs,' Dussander said finally. 'Look in my dresser. The third drawer.
There is a small wooden box in the bottom of that drawer. You will have to
break it open. I lost the key a long time ago. There are some very old letters
from a friend of
mine. None signed. None dated. All in German. A page or- o will serve
for window-fittings, as you would say. If you hurry -'
'Are you crazy?' Todd raged. 'I don't understand German! How could I
read you a letter written in German, you numb fuck?'
'Why would Willi write me in English?' Dussander countered wearily. 'If
you read me the letter in German, I would understand it even if you did not.
Of course your pronunciation would be butchery, but still, I could -'
Dussander was right-right again, and Todd didn't wait to hear more. Even
after a heart attack the old man was a step ahead. Todd raced down the hall
to the stairs, pausing just long enough by the front door to make sure his
father's Porsche wasn't pulling up even now. It wasn't, but Todd's watch told
him just how tight things were getting; it had been five minutes now.
He took the stairs two at a time and burst into Dussander's bedroom. He
had never been up here before, hadn't even been curious, and for a moment
he only looked wildly around at the unfamiliar territory. Then he saw the
dresser, a cheap item done in the style his father called Discount Store
Modern. He fell on his knees in front of it and yanked at the third drawer. It
came halfway out, then jigged sideways in its slot and stuck firmly.
'Goddam you,' he whispered at it. His face was dead pale except for the
spots of dark, bloody colour flaring in each cheek and his blue eyes, which
looked as dark as Atlantic storm-clouds. 'Goddam you fucking thing come
out!'
He yanked so hard that the entire dresser tottered forward and almost fell
on him before deciding to settle back. The drawer shot all the way out and
landed in Todd's lap. Dussander's socks and underwear and handkerchiefs
spilled out all around him. He pawed through the stuff that was still in the
drawer and came up with a wooden box about nine inches long and three
inches deep. He tried to pull up the lid. Nothing happened. It was locked,
just as Dussander had said. Nothing was free tonight. He stuffed the spilled
clothes back into the drawer and then rammed the drawer back into its
oblong slot. It stuck again. Todd worked to free it, wiggling it back and
forth, sweat running freely down his face. At last he was able to slam it shut
He got up with the box. How much time had passed now?
Dussander's bed was the type with posts at the foot and Todd brought the
lock side of the box down on one of these posts as hard as he could,
grinning at the shock of pain that vibrated in his hands and travelled all the
way up to his elbows. He looked at the lock. The lock looked a bit dented,
but it was intact. He brought it down on the post again, even harder this
time, heedless of the pain. This time a chunk of wood flew off the bedpost,
but the lock still didn't give. Todd uttered a little shriek of laughter and took
the box to the other end of the bed. He raised it high over his head this time
and brought it down with all his strength. This time the lock splintered. As
he flipped the lid up, headlights splashed across Dussander's window. He
pawed wildly through the box. Postcards. A locket. A Apt Pupil 249 much-
folded picture of a woman wearing frilly black garters and nothing else. An
old billfold. Several sets of ID. An empty leather passport folder. At the
bottom, letters.
The lights grew brighter, and now he heard the distinctive neat of the
Porsche's engine. It grew louder and then cut off.
Todd grabbed three sheets of airmail-type stationery, closely written in
German on both sides of each sheet, and -an out of the room again. He had
almost gotten to the stairs when he realized he had left the forced box lying
on Dussander's bed. He ran back, grabbed it, and opened the third dresser
drawer.
It stuck again, this time with a firm shriek of wood against wood.
Out front, he heard the ratchet of the Porsche's emergency brake, the
opening of the driver's side door, the slam shut.
Faintly, Todd could hear himself moaning. He put the box in the askew
drawer, stood up, and lashed at it with his foot. The drawer closed neatly.
He stood blinking at it for a moment and then fled back down the hall. He
raced down the stairs. Halfway down them, he heard the rapid rattle of his
father's shoes on Dussander's walk. Todd vaulted over the banister, landed
lightly, and ran into the kitchen, the airmail pages fluttering from his hand.
A hammering on the door. 'Todd? Todd, it's me!'
And he could hear an ambulance siren in the distance as well. Dussander
had drifted away into semi-consciousness again.
'Coming, dad!' Todd shouted.
He put the airmail pages on the table, fanning them a little as if they had
been dropped in a hurry, and then he went back down the hall and let his
father in.
'Where is he?' Dick Bowden asked, shouldering past Todd.
'In the kitchen.'
'You did everything just right, Todd,' his father said, and then hugged him
in a rough, embarrassed way.
'I just hope I remembered everything,' Todd said modestly, and then
followed his father down the hall and into the kitchen.
In the rush to get Dussander out of the house, the letter was almost
completely ignored.
Todd's father picked it up briefly, then put it down when the medics came
in with the stretcher. Todd and his father followed the ambulance, and his
explanation of what had happened was accepted without question by the
doctor attending Dussander's case. 'Mr Denker' was, after all, seventy-nine
years old, and his habits were not the best The doctor also offered Todd a
brusque commendation for his quick thinking and action. Todd thanked him
wanly and then asked his father if they could go home.
As they rode back, Dick told him again how proud of him he was. Todd
barely heard him. He was thinking about his.30-.30 again.
18
That was the same day Morris Heisel broke his back.
Morris had never intended to break his back; all he had intended to do
was nail up the corner of the rain-gutter on the west side of his house.
Breaking his back was the furthest thing from his mind, he had had enough
grief in his life without that, thank you very much. His first wife had died at
the age of twenty-five, and both of their daughters were also dead. His
brother was dead, killed in a tragic car accident not far from Disneyland in
1971. Morris himself was Hearing sixty, and had a case of arthritis that was
worsening early and fast. He also had warts on both hands, warts that
seemed to grow back as fast as the doctor could burn them off. He was also
prone to migraine headaches, and in the last couple of years, that potzer
Rogan next door had taken to calling him 'Morris the Cat'.
Morris had wondered aloud to Lydia, his second wife, how Rogan would
like it if Morris took up calling him 'Rogan the haemorrhoid'.
'Quit it, Morris,' Lydia said on these occasions. 'You can't take a joke, you
never could take a joke, sometimes I wonder how I could marry a man with
absolutely no sense of humour. We go to Las Vegas,' Lydia had said,
addressing the empty kitchen as if an invisible horde of spectators which
only she could see was standing there, 'we see Buddy Hackett, and Morris
doesn't laugh once.'
Besides arthritis, warts, and migraines, Morris also had Lydia, who, God
love her, had developed into something of a nag over the last five years or
so ever since her hysterectomy. So he had plenty of sorrows and plenty of
problems without adding a broken back.
'Morris!' Lydia cried, coming to the back door and wiping suds from her
hands with a dishtowel. 'Morris, you come down off that ladder right now!'
'What?' He twisted his head so he could see her. He was on the second-
highest step of his aluminium stepladder. There was a bright yellow sticker
on this step which said: DANGER! BALANCE MAY SHIFT WITHOUT
WARNING ABOVE THIS STEP!
Morris was wearing his carpenter's apron with the wide pockets, one of
the pockets filled with nails and the other filled with heavy-duty staples.
The ground under the stepladder's feet was slightly uneven and the ladder
rocked a little when he moved. His neck ached with the unlovely prelude to
one of his migraines. He was out of temper. 'What?'
'Come down from there, I said, before you break your back.'
'I'm almost finished.'
'You're rocking on that ladder like you were on a boat, Morris. Come
down.'
'I'll come down when I'm done!' he said angrily. 'Leave me alone!'
'You'll break your back,' she reiterated dolefully, and went into the house
again.
Ten minutes later, as he was hammering the last nail into the rain-gutter,
tipped back nearly to the point of overbalancing, he heard a feline yowl
followed by fierce barking.
'What in God's name -?'
He looked around and the stepladder rocked alarmingly. At that same
moment, their cat-it was named Lover Boy, not Morris-tore around the
corner of the garage, its fur bushed out into hackles and its green eyes
flaring. The Regans' collie pup was in hot pursuit, its tongue hanging out
and its leash dragging behind it Lover Boy, apparently not superstitious, ran
under the stepladder. The collie pup followed.
'Look out, look out, you dumb mutt!' Morris shouted.
The ladder rocked. The pup bunted it with the side of its body. The ladder
tipped over and Morris tipped with it, uttering a howl of dismay. Nails and
staples flew out of his carpenter's apron. He landed half on and half off the
concrete driveway, and a gigantic agony flared in his back. He did not so
much hear his spine snap as feel it happen. Then the world greyed out for
awhile.
When things swam back into focus, he was still lying half on and half off
the driveway in a litter of nails and staples. Lydia was kneeling over him,
weeping. Rogan from next door was there, too, his face as white as a
shroud.
'I told you!' Lydia babbled. 'I told you to come down off that ladder! Now
look! Now look at this!'
Morris found he had absolutely no desire to look. A suffocating,
throbbing band of pain had cinched itself around his middle like a belt, and
that was bad, but
there was something much worse: he could feel nothing below that belt
of pain-nothing at all.
'Wail later,' he said huskily. 'Call the doctor now.'
'I'll do it,' Rogan said, and ran back to his own house.
'Lydia,' Morris said. He wet his lips.
'What? What, Morris?' She bent over him and a tear splashed on his
cheek. It was touching, he supposed, but it had made him flinch, and the
flinch had made the pain worse.
'Lydia, I also have one of my migraines.'
'Oh, poor darling! Poor Morris! But I told you -'
'I've got the headache because that potzer Rogan's dog barked all night
and kept me awake. Today the dog chases my cat and knocks over my
ladder and I think my back is broken.'
Lydia shrieked. The sound made Morris's head vibrate.
'Lydia,' he said, and wet his lips again.
'What, darling?'
'I have suspected something for many years. Now I am sure.'
'My poor Morris! What?'
'There is no God,' Morris said, and fainted.
They took him to Santa Donate and his doctor told him, at about the same
time that he would have ordinarily been sitting down to one of Lydia's
wretched suppers, that he would never walk again. By then they had put
him in a body cast. Blood and urine samples had been taken. Dr
Kemmelman had peered into his eyes and tapped his knees with a little
rubber hammer-but no reflexive twitch of the foot answered the taps. And at
every turn there was Lydia, the tears streaming from her eyes, as she used
up one handkerchief after another. Lydia, a woman who would have been at
home married to Job, went everywhere well supplied with little lace
snotrags, just in case reason for an extended crying spell should occur. She
had called her mother, and her mother would be here soon ("That's nice,
Lydia'-although if there was anyone on earth Morris honestly loathed, it was
Lydia's mother). She had called the rabbi, he would be here soon, too
('That's nice, Lydia'-although he hadn't set foot inside the synagogue in five
years and wasn't sure what the rabbi's name was). She had called his boss,
and while he wouldn't be here soon, he sent his greatest sympathies and
condolences ('That's nice, Lydia'-although if there was anyone in a class
with Lydia's mother, it was that cigar-chewing putz Frank Haskell). At last
they gave Morris a Valium and took Lydia away. Shortly afterwards, Morris
just drifted away-no worries, no migraine, no nothing. If they kept giving
him little blue pills like that, went his last thought, he would go on up that
stepladder and break his back again.
When he woke up-or regained consciousness, that was more like it-dawn
was just breaking, and the hospital was as quiet as Morris supposed it ever
got He felt very calm almost serene. He had no pain; his body felt
swaddled and weightless. His bed had been surrounded by some sort of
contraption like a squirrel cage- a thing of stainless steel bars, guy wires,
and pulleys. His legs were being held up by cables attached to this gadget.
His back seemed to be bowed by something beneath, but it was hard to tell-
he had only the angle of his vision to judge by.
Others have it worse, he thought. All over the world, others have it
worse. In Israel, the Palestinians kill busloads of farmers who were
committing the political crime of going into town to see a movie. The
Israelis cope with this injustice by dropping bombs on the Palestinians and
killing children along with whatever terrorists
may be there. Others have it worse than me which is not to say this is
good, don't get that idea, but others have it worse.
He lifted one hand with some effort-there was pain somewhere in his
body, but it was very faint-and made a weak fist in front of his eyes. There.
Nothing wrong with his hands. Nothing wrong with his arms, either. So he
couldn't feel anything below the waist, so what? There were people all over
the world paralyzed from the neck down. There were people with leprosy.
There were people dying of syphilis. Somewhere in the world right now,
there might be people walking down the jetway and onto a plane that was
going to crash. No, this wasn't good, but there were worse things in the
world. And there had been, once upon a time, much worse things in the
world. He raised his left arm. It seemed to float, disembodied, before his
eyes- a scrawny old man's arm with the muscles deteriorating. He was in a
hospital johnny but it had short sleeves and he could still read the number
on the forearm, tattooed there in faded blue ink. A499965214. Worse
things, yes, worse things than falling off a suburban stepladder and breaking
your back and being taken to a clean and sterile metropolitan hospital and
being given a Valium that was guaranteed to bubble your troubles away.
There were the showers, they were worse. His first wife, Heather, had died
in one of their filthy showers. There were the trenches that became graves-
he could close his eyes and still see the men lined up along the open maw of
the trenches, could still hear the volley of rifle fire, could still remember the
way they flopped backwards into the earth like badly made puppets. There
were the crematoriums, they were worse, too, toe crematoriums that filled
the air with the steady sweet smell of Jews burning like torches no one
could see. The horror-struck faces of old friends and relatives faces that
melted away like gutturing candles, faces that seemed to melt away before
your very eyes-thin, thinner, thinnest. Then one day they were gone.
Where? Where does a torch-flame go when the cold wind has blown it out?
Heaven? Hell? Lights in the darkness, candles in the wind. When Job
finally broke down and questioned, God asked him: Where were you when
I made the world? If Morris Heisel had been Job, he would have responded:
Where were You when my Heather was dying, You potzer, You? Watching
the Yankees and the Senators? If You can't pay attention to Your business
better than this, get out of my face. Yes, there were worse things than
breaking your back, he had no doubt of it But what sort of God would have
allowed him to break his back and become paralyzed for life after watching
his wife die, and his daughters, and his friends? No God at all, that was
Who.
A tear trickled from the corner of his ear. Outside the hospital room, a
bell rang softly. A nurse squeaked by on white crepe-soled shoes. His door
was ajar, and on the far wall of the corridor outside he could read the letters
NSIVE CA and guessed that the whole sign must read INTENSIVE CARE.
There was movement in the room- a rustle of bedclothes.
Moving very carefully, Morris turned his head to the right, away from the
door. He saw a night-table next to him with a pitcher of water on it. There
were two call-buttons on the table. Beyond it was another bed, and in the
bed was a man who looked even older and sicker than Morris felt. He was
not hooked into a giant exercise-wheel for gerbils like Morris was, but an
IV feed stood beside his bed and some sort of monitoring console stood at
its foot The man's skin was sunken and yellow. Lines around his mouth and
eyes had driven deep. His hair was yellowish-white, dry and lifeless. His
thin eyelids had a bruised and shiny look, and in his big nose Morris saw
the burst capillaries of the lifelong drinker.
Morris looked away and then looked back. As the dawn light grew
stronger and the hospital began to wake up, he began to have the strangest
feeling that he knew
his roommate. Could that be? The man looked to be somewhere between
seventy-five and eighty, and Morris didn't believe he knew anyone quite
that old-except for Lydia's mother, a horror Morris sometimes believed to
be older than the Sphinx, whom the woman closely resembled.
Maybe the guy was someone he had known in the past, maybe even
before he, Morris, came to America. Maybe. Maybe not. And why all of a
sudden did it seem to matter? For that matter, why had all his memories of
the camp, of Patin, come flooding back tonight, when he always tried to -
and most times succeeded in-keeping those things buried? He broke out in a
sudden rash of gooseflesh, as if he had stepped into some mental haunted
house where old bodies were unquiet and old ghosts walked. Could that be,
even here and now in this clean hospital, thirty years after those dark times
had ended? He looked away from the old man in the other bed, and soon he
had begun to feel sleepy again. It's a trick of your mind that this other man
seems familiar. Only your mind, amusing you in the best way it can,
amusing you the way it used to try to amuse you in-But he would not think
of that. He would not allow himself to think of that.
Drifting into sleep, he thought of a boast he had made to Heather (but
never to Lydia; it didn't pay to boast to Lydia; she was not like Heather, who
would always smile sweetly at his harmless puffing and crowing): I never
forget a face. Here was his chance to find out if that was still so. If he had
really known the man in the other bed at some time or other, perhaps he
could remember when and where.
Very close to sleep, drifting back and forth across its threshold, Morris
thought: Perhaps I knew him in the camp. That would be ironic indeed-what
they called 'a jest of God'.
What God? Morris Heisel asked himself again, and slept.
19
Todd graduated salutatorian of his class, just possibly because of his poor
grade on the trig final he had been studying for the night Dussander had his
heart attack. It dragged his final grade in the course down to 91, one point
below A- average.
A week after graduation, the Bowdens went to visit Mr. Denker at Santa
Donate General.
Todd fidgeted through fifteen minutes of banalities and thank-yous and
how-do-you-feels and was grateful for the break when the man in the other
bed asked him if he could come over for a minute.
'You'll pardon me,' the other man said apologetically. He was in a huge
body cast and was for some reason attached to an overhead system of
pulleys and wires. 'My name is Morris Heisel. I broke my back.'
That's too bad,' Todd said gravely.
'0y, too bad, he says! This boy has the gift of understatement!'
Todd started to apologize, but Heisel raised his hand, smiling a little. His
face was pale and tired, the face of any old man in the hospital facing a life
full of sweeping changes just ahead-and surely few of them for the better. In
that way, Todd thought, he and Dussander were alike.
'No need,' Morris said. 'No need to answer a rude comment. You are a
stranger. Does a stranger need to be inflicted with my problems?'
' "No man is an island, separate from the main -"' Todd began, and Morris
laughed.
'Donne, he quotes at me! A smart kid! Your friend there, is he very bad
off?'
'Well, the doctors say he's doing fine, considering his age. He's seventy
nine.'
'That old!' Morris exclaimed. 'He doesn't talk to me much, you know. But
from what he does say, I'd guess he's naturalized. Like me. I'm Polish, you
know. Originally, I mean. From Raden.'
'Oh?' Todd said politely.
'Yes. You know what they call an orange manhole cover in Radan?'
'No,' Todd said, smiling.
'Howard Johnson's,' Morris said, and laughed. Todd laughed, too.
Dussander glanced over at them, startled by the sound and frowning a little.
Then Monica said something and he looked back at her again.
'Is your friend naturalized?'
'Oh, yes,' Todd said. 'He's from Germany. Essen. Do you know that
town?'
'No,' Morris said, 'but I was only in Germany once. I wonder if he was in
the
war.'
'I really couldn't say.' Todd's eyes had gone distant.
'No? Well, it doesn't matter. That was a long time ago, the war. In another
two years there will be people in this country constitutionally eligible to
become President-President!-who weren't even born until after the war was
over. To them it must seem there is no difference between the Miracle of
Dunkirk and Hannibal taking his elephants over the Alps.'
'Were you in the war?' Todd asked.
'I suppose I was, in a manner of speaking. You're a good boy to visit such
an old man two old men, counting me.'
Todd smiled modestly.
'I'm tired now,' Morris said. 'Perhaps I'll sleep.'
'I hope you'll feel better very soon,' Todd said.
Morris nodded, smiled, and closed his eyes. Todd went back to
Dussander's bed, where his parents were just getting ready to leave-his dad
kept glancing at his watch and exclaiming with bluff heartiness at how late
it was getting. But Morris Heisel wasn't asleep, and he didn't sleep-not for a
long time.
Two days later, Todd came back to the hospital alone. This time, Morris
Heisel, immured in his body-cast, was deeply asleep in the other bed.
'You did well,' Dussander said quietly. 'Did you go back to the house
later?'
'Yes. I put the box back and burned the damned letter. I don't think
anyone was too interested in that letter, and I was afraid I don't know.' He
shrugged, unable to tell Dussander he'd been almost superstitiously afraid
about that letter-afraid that maybe someone would wander into the house
who could read German, someone who would notice references in the letter
that were ten, perhaps twenty years out of date.
'Next time you come, smuggle me in something to drink,' Dussander said.
'I find I don't miss the cigarettes, but -'
'I won't be back again,' Todd said flatly. 'Not ever. It's the end. We're
quits.'
'Quits.' Dussander folded his hands on his chest and smiled. It was not a
gentle smile but it was perhaps as close as Dussander could come to such
a thing. 'I thought that was on the cards. They are going to let me out of this
graveyard next week or so they promise. The doctor says I may have a
few years left in my skin yet.
I ask him how many, and he just laughs. I suspect that means no more
than three, and probably no more than two. Still, I may give him a surprise
and see in Orwell's year.'
Todd, who would have frowned suspiciously over such a reference two
years ago, now only nodded.
'But between you and me, boy, I have almost given up my hopes of
seeing the century turn.'
'I want to ask you about something,' Todd said, looking at Dussander
steadily. 'That's why I came in today. I want to ask you about something you
said once.'
Todd glanced over his shoulder at the man in the other bed and then drew
his chair closer to Dussander's bed. He could smell Dussander's smell, as
dry as the Egyptian room in the museum.
'So ask.'
'That wino. You said something about me having experience. First-hand
experience.
What was that supposed to mean?'
Dussander's smile widened a bit. 'I read the newspapers, boy. Old men
always read the newspapers, but not in the same way younger people do.
Buzzards are known to gather at the ends of certain airport runways in
South America when the crosswinds are treacherous, did you know that?
That is how an old man reads the newspaper. A month ago there was a story
in the Sunday paper. Not a front page story, no one cares enough about
bums and alcoholics to put them on the front page, but it was the lead story
in the feature section, IS SOMEONE STALKING SANTA DONATO'S
DOWN-AND-OUTS?-that's what it was called. Crude. Yellow journalism.
You Americans are famous for it' Todd's hands were clenched into fists,
hiding the butchered nails. He never read the Sunday papers, he had better
things to do with his time. He had of course checked the papers every day
for at least a week following each of his little adventures, and none of his
stewbums had ever gotten beyond page three. The idea that someone had
been making connections behind his back infuriated him. 'The story
mentioned several murders, extremely brutal murders. Stabbings,
bludgeonings. "Subhuman brutality" was how the writer put it, but you
know reporters. The writer of this lamentable piece admitted that there is a
high death-rate among these unfortunates, and that Santa Donato has had
more than its share of the indigent over the years. In any given year, not all
of these men die naturally, or of their own bad habits. There are frequent
murders. But in most cases the murderer is usually one of the deceased
degenerate's compatriots, the motive no more than an argument over a
penny-ante card-game or a bottle of muscatel. The killer is usually happy to
confess. He is filled with remorse.
'But these recent killings have not been solved. Even more ominous, to
this yellow journalist's mind-or whatever passes for his mind-is the high
disappearance rate over the last few years. Of course, he admits again, these
men are not much more than modern-day hobos. They come and go. But
some of these left without picking up welfare cheques or day-labour
cheques from Spell O' Work, which only pays on Fridays. Could some of
these have been victims of this yellow journalist's Wino Killer, he asks?
Victims who haven't been found? Pah!'
Dussander waved his hand in the air as if to dismiss such arrant
irresponsibility. 'Only titillation, of course. Give people a comfortable little
scare on Sunday morning. He calls up old bogies, threadbare but still
useful-the Cleveland Torso Murderer, Zodiac, the mysterious Mr X who
killed the Black Dahlia, Springheel Jack. Such drivel. But it makes me
think. What does an old man have to do but think when old friends don't
come to visit anymore?' Todd shrugged.
'I thought: "If I wished to help this odious yellow-dog journalist, which I
certainly do not, I could explain some of the disappearances. Not the
corpses found stabbed or bludgeoned, not them, God rest their besotted
souls, but some of the disappearances. Because at least some of the bums
who disappeared are in my cellar."'
'How many down there?' Todd asked in a low voice.
'Five,' Dussander said calmly. 'Counting the one you helped me dispose
of, just five.'
'You're really nutso,' Todd said. The skin below his eyes had gone white
and shiny. 'At some point you just blew all your fucking wheels.'
'"Blew my wheels." What a charming idiom! Perhaps you're right! But
then I said to myself: "This newspaper jackal would love to pin the murders
and the disappearances on the same somebody-his hypothetical Wino Killer.
But I think maybe that's not what happened at all." Then I say to myself:
"Do I know anybody who might be doing such things? Somebody who has
been under as much strain as I have during the last few years? Someone
who has also been listening to old ghosts rattle their chains?" And the
answer is yes. I know you, boy.'
'I've never killed anyone.'
The image that came was not of the winos; they weren't people, not really
people at all.
The image that came was of himself crouched behind the dead tree,
peering through the telescopic sight of his.30-.30, the crosshairs fixed on
the temple of the man with the scuzzy beard, the man driving the Brat pick-
up.
'Perhaps not,' Dussander agreed, amicably enough. 'Yet you took hold so
well the other night. Your surprise was mostly anger at having been put in
such a dangerous position by an old man's infirmity, I think. Am I wrong?'
'No, you're not wrong,' Todd said. 'I was pissed off at you, and I still am.
I covered it up for you because you've got something in a safety deposit box
that could destroy my life.'
'No. I do not'
'What? What are you talking about?'
'It was as much a bluff as your "letter left with a friend". You never wrote
such a letter, there never was such a friend, and I have never written a single
word about our association, shall I call it? Now I lay my cards on the
table. You saved my life. Never mind that you acted only to protect
yourself; that does not change how speedily and efficiently you acted. I
cannot hurt you, boy. I tell you that freely. I have looked death in the face
and it frightens me, but not as badly as! thought it would. There is no
document. It is as you say: we are quits.'
Todd smiled: a weird upward corkscrewing of the lips. A strange,
sardonic light danced and fluttered in his eyes.
'Herr Dussander,' he said, 'if only I could believe that'.
In the evening Todd walked down to the slope overlooking the freeway,
climbed down to the dead tree, and sat on it. It was just past twilight. The
evening was warm. Car headlights cut through the dusk in long yellow
daisy chains.
There is no document.
He hadn't realized how completely irretrievable the entire situation was
until the discussion that had followed. Dussander suggested Todd search the
house for a safety deposit key, and when he didn't find one, that would
prove there was no safety deposit box and hence no document. But a key
could be hidden anywhere-it could be put in a Crisco can and then buried, it
could be put in a Sucrets tin and slid behind a board that had been loosened
and then replaced; he might even have ridden the bus to
San Diego and put it behind one of the rocks in the decorative stone wall
which surrounds the bears' environmental area. For that matter, Todd went
on, Dussander could even have thrown the key away. Why not? He had
only needed it once, to put his written document in. If he died, someone else
would take it out. Dussander nodded reluctantly at this, but after a moment's
thought he made another suggestion. When he got well enough to go home,
he would have the boy call every single bank in Santa Donato. He would
tell each bank official he was calling for his grandfather. Poor grandfather,
he would say, had grown lamentably senile over the last two years, and now
he had misplaced the key to his safety deposit box. Even worse, he could no
longer remember which bank the box was in. Could they just check their
files for an Arthur Denker, no middle initial? And when Todd drew a blank
at every bank in town-Todd was already shaking his head again. First, a
story like that was almost guaranteed to raise suspicions. It was too pat.
They would probably suspect a con-game and get in touch with the police.
Even if every one of them bought the story, it would do no good. If none of
the almost nine dozen banks in Santa Donato had a box in the Denker name,
it didn't mean that Dussander hadn't rented one in San Diego, LA, or any
town in between. At last Dussander gave up.
'You have all the answers, boy. All, at least, but one. What would I stand
to gain by lying to you? I invented this story to protect myself from you-
that is a motive. Now I am trying to uninvent it. What possible gain do you
see in that?' Dussander got laboriously up on one elbow.
'For that matter, why would I need a document at all, at this point? I
could destroy your life from this hospital bed, if that was what I wanted. I
could open my mouth to the first passing doctor, they are all Jews, they
would all know who I am, or at least who I was. But why would I do this?
You are a fine student You have a fine career ahead of you unless you get
careless with those winos of yours.'
Todd's face froze. 'I never told you -'
'I know. You never heard of them, you never touched so much as a hair
on their scaly, tick-ridden heads, all right, good, fine. I say no more about it.
Only tell me, boy: why should I lie about this? We are quits, you say. But I
tell you we can only be quits if we can trust each other.'
Now, sitting behind the dead tree on the slope which ran down to the
freeway, looking at all the anonymous headlights disappearing endlessly
like slow tracer bullets, he knew well enough what he was afraid of.
Dussander talking about trust. That made him afraid.
The idea that Dussander might be tending a small but perfect flame of
hatred deep in his heart, that made him afraid, too.
A hatred of Todd Bowden, who was young, clean-featured, unwrinkled;
Todd Bowden, who was an apt pupil with a whole bright life stretching
ahead of him. But what he feared most was Dussander's refusal to use his
name. Todd. What was so hard about that, even for an old Kraut whose
teeth were mostly false? Todd. One syllable. Easy to say. Put your tongue
against the roof of your mouth, drop your teeth a little, replace your tongue,
and it was out. Yet Dussander had always called him 'boy'. Only that.
Contemptuous. Anonymous. Yes, that was it, anonymous. As anonymous as
a concentration camp serial number.
Perhaps Dussander was telling the truth. No, not just perhaps; probably.
But there were those fears the worst of them being Dussander's refusal to
use his name. And at the root of it all was his own inability to make a hard
and final decision. At the root of it all was a rueful truth: even after four
years of visiting Dussander, he still didn't know what went on in the old
man's head. Perhaps he wasn't such an apt pupil after all. Cars and cars and
cars. His fingers itched to hold his rifle. How many could he get? Three?
Six? An even baker's dozen? And how many miles to Babylon? He stirred
restlessly, uneasily.
Only Dussander's death would tell the final truth, he supposed. Sometime
during the next five years, maybe even sooner. Three to five it sounded
like a prison sentence. Todd Bowden, this court hereby sentences you to
three to five for associating with a known war criminal. Three to five of bad
dreams and cold sweats.
Sooner or later Dussander would simply drop dead. Then the waiting
would begin. The knot in the stomach every time the phone or the doorbell
rang.
He wasn't sure he could stand that.
His fingers itched to hold the gun and Todd curled them into fists and
drove both fists into his crotch. Sick pain swallowed his belly and he lay for
some time afterwards in a writhing ball on the ground, his lips pulled back
in a silent shriek. The pain was dreadful, but it blotted out the endless
parade of thoughts.
At least for a while.
20
For Morris Heisel, that Sunday was a day of miracles.
The Atlanta Braves, his favourite baseball team, swept a double-header
from the high and mighty Cincinnati Reds by scores of 7-1 and 8-0. Lydia,
who boasted smugly of always taking care of herself and whose favourite
saying was 'An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,' slipped on
her friend Janet's wet kitchen floor and sprained her hip. She was at home in
bed. It wasn't serious, not at all, and thank God (what God?) for that, but it
meant she wouldn't be able to visit him for at least two days, maybe as long
as four.
Four days without Lydia! Four days that he wouldn't have to hear about
how she had warned him that the stepladder was wobbly and how he was
up too high on it in the bargain. Four days when he wouldn't have to listen
to her tell him how she'd always said the Rogans' pup was going to cause
them grief, always chasing Lover Boy that way. Four days without Lydia
asking him if he wasn't glad now that she had kept after him about sending
in that insurance application, for if she had not, they would surely be on
their way to the poorhouse now. Four days without having Lydia tell him
that many people lived perfectly normal lives-almost, anyway -paralyzed
from the waist down; why, every museum and gallery in the city had
wheelchair ramps as well as stairs, and there were even special buses. After
this observation, Lydia would smile bravely and then inevitably burst into
tears.
Morris drifted off into a contented late afternoon nap.
When he woke up it was half-past five in the afternoon. His roommate
was asleep. He still hadn't placed Denker, but all the same he felt sure that
he had known the man at some time or other. He had begun to ask Denker
about himself once or twice, but then something had held him back. That
same something kept him from making more than the most banal
conversation with the man-the weather, the last earthquake, the next
earthquake, and yeah, the Guide says Myron Floren is going to come back
for a special guest appearance this weekend on the Welk show.
Morris told himself he was holding back because it gave him a mental
game to play, and when you were in a body-cast from your shoulders to
your hips, mental games can come in handy. If you had a little mental
contest going on, you didn't have to spend quite so much time wondering
how it was going to be, pissing through a catheter for the rest of your life.
If he came right out and asked Denker, the mental game would probably
come to a swift and unsatisfying conclusion. They would narrow their pasts
down to some common experience- a train trip, a boat ride, possibly even
the camp. Denker might have been in Patin; there had been plenty of
German Jews there.
On the other hand, one of the nurses had told him Denker would
probably be going home in a week or two. If Morris couldn't figure it out by
then, he would mentally declare the game lost and ask the man straight out:
Say, I've had the feeling I know you-But there was more to it than just that,
he admitted to himself. There was something in his feelings, a nasty sort of
undertow, that made him think of that story 'The Monkey's Paw', where
every wish had been granted as the result of some evil turn of fate. The old
couple who came into possession of the paw wished for a hundred dollars
and received it as a gift of condolence when their only son was killed in a
nasty mill accident. Then the mother had wished for the son to return to
them. They had heard footsteps dragging up their walk shortly afterwards;
then pounding on the door, a perfect fusillade of blows.
The mother, mad with joy, had gone rushing down the stairs to let in her
only child. The father, mad with quite another emotion, scrabbled through
the darkness for the dried paw, found it at last, and wished his son dead
again. The mother threw the door open a moment later and found nothing
on the stoop but an eddy of night wind.
In some way Morris felt that perhaps he did know where he and Denker
had been acquainted, but that his knowledge was like the son of the old
couple in the story-returned from the grave, but not as he was in his
mother's memory; returned, instead, horribly crushed and mangled from his
fall into the gnashing, whirling machinery. He felt that his knowledge of
Denker might be a subconscious thing, pounding on the door between that
area of his mind and that of rational understanding and recognition,
demanding admittance and that another part of him was searching
frantically for the monkey's paw, or its psychological equivalent; for the
talisman that would wish away the knowledge forever.
Now he looked at Denker, frowning.
Denker. Denker. Where have I known you, Denker? Was it Patin? Is that
why I don't want to know? But surely, two survivors of a common horror do
not have to be afraid of each other. Unless, of course
He frowned. He felt very close to it, suddenly, but his feet were tingling,
breaking his concentration, annoying him. They were tingling in just the
way a limb tingles when you've slept on it and it's returning to normal
circulation. If it wasn't for the damned body-cast, he could sit up and rub his
feet until that tingle went away. He could-Morris's eyes widened.
For a long time he lay perfectly still, Lydia forgotten, Denker forgotten,
Patin forgotten, everything forgotten except that tingly feeling in his feet
Yes, both feet, but it was stronger in the right one. When you felt that tingle,
you said My foot went to sleep.'
But what you really meant, of course, was My foot is waking up.
Morris fumbled for the call-button. He pressed it again and again until
the nurse came.
The nurse tried to dismiss it-she had had hopeful patients before. His
doctor wasn't in the building, and the nurse didn't want to call him at home.
Dr Kemmelman had a vast reputation for evil temper especially when he
was called at home. Morris wouldn't let her dismiss it. He was a mild man,
but now he was prepared to make more than a fuss; he was prepared to
make an uproar if that's what it took. The Braves had taken two. Lydia had
sprained her hip. But good things came in threes, everyone knew that. At
last the nurse came back with an intern, a young man named Dr Timpnell
whose hair looked as if it had last been cut by a Lawn Boy with very dull
blades. Dr Timpnell pulled a Swiss Army knife from the pocket of his white
pants, folded out the Phillips screwdriver attachment, and ran it from the
toes of Morris's right foot down to the heel.
The foot did not curl, but his toes twitched-it was an obvious twitch, too
definite to miss. Morris burst into tears.
Timpnell, looking rather dazed, sat beside him on the bed and patted his
hand.
'This sort of thing happens from time to time,' he said (possibly from his
wealth of practical experience, which stretched back perhaps as far as six
months). 'No doctor predicts it, but it does happen. And apparently it's
happened to you.'
Morris nodded through his tears.
'Obviously, you're not totally paralyzed.' Timpnell was still patting his
hand. 'But I wouldn't try to predict if your recovery will be slight, partial, or
total. I doubt if Dr Kemmelman will, either. I suspect you'll have to undergo
a lot of physical therapy, and not all of it will be pleasant. But it will be
more pleasant than you know.'
'Yes,' Morris said through his tears. 'I know. Thank God!' He remembered
telling Lydia there was no God and felt his face fill up with hot blood.
'I'll see that Dr Kemmelman is informed,' Timpnell said, giving Morris's
hand a final pat and rising.
'Could you call my wife?' Morris asked. Because, doom-crying and hand-
wringing aside, he felt something for her. Maybe it was even love, an
emotion which seemed to have little to do with sometimes feeling like you
could wring a person's neck.
'Yes, I'll see that it's done. Nurse, would you -?'
'Of course, doctor,' the nurse said, and Timpnell could barely stifle his
grin.
"Thank you,' Morris said, wiping his eyes with a Kleenex from the box
on the nightstand.
Thank you very much.'
Timpnell went out. At some point during the discussion, Mr. Denker had
awakened.
Morris considered apologizing for all the noise, or perhaps for his tears,
and then decided no apology was necessary.
'You are to be congratulated, I take it,' Mr Denker said.
'Well see,' Morris said, but like Timpnell, he was barely able to stifle his
grin. 'We'll see.'
'Things have a way of working out,' Denker replied vaguely, and then
turned on the TV with the remote control device. It was now quarter to six,
and they watched the last of Hee-Haw. It was followed by the evening
news. Unemployment was worse. Inflation was not so bad. The hostages
were still hostages. A new Gallup poll showed that, if the election were to
be held right then, there were four Republican candidates who could beat
Jimmy Carter. And there had been racial incidents following the murder of
a black child in Atlanta (it would be another six months before a grisly
pattern of murder began to emerge in the Atlanta murders)-'A night of
violence', the
newscaster called it. Closer to home, an unidentified man had been found
in an orchard near Highway 46, stabbed and bludgeoned.
Lydia called just before 6:30. Dr Kemmelman had called her and, based
on the young intern's report, he had been cautiously optimistic. Lydia was
cautiously joyous. She vowed to come in the following day even if it killed
her. Morris told her he loved her.
Tonight he loved everyone -Lydia, Dr Timpnell with his Lawn Boy
haircut, Mr Denker, even the young girl who brought in the supper trays as
Morris hung up.
Supper was hamburgers, mashed potatoes, a carrots-and-peas
combination, and small dishes of ice cream for dessert. The candy striper
who served it was Felice, a shy blonde girl of perhaps twenty. She had her
own good news-her boyfriend had landed a job as a computer programmer
with IBM and had formally asked her to marry him.
Mr. Denker, who exuded a certain courtly charm that all the young ladies
responded to, expressed great pleasure. 'Really, how wonderful. You must
sit down and tell us all about it. Tell us everything. Omit nothing.'
Felice blushed and smiled and said she couldn't do that. 'We've still got
the rest of B wing to do and C wing after that. And look, here it is six-
thirty!'
'Then tomorrow night, for sure. We insist-don't we, Mr. Heisel?'
'Yes indeed,' Morris murmured, but his mind was a million miles away.
(you must sit down and tell us all about it)
Words spoken in that exact-same bantering tone. He had heard them
before; of that there could be no doubt. But had Denker been the one to
speak them? Had he?
(tell us everything)
The voice of an urbane man. A cultured man. But there was a threat in
the voice. A steel hand in a velvet glove. Yes.
Where?
(tell us everything. Omit nothing.)
(? Patin?)
Morris Heisel looked at his supper. Mr Denker had already fallen to with
a will. The encounter with Felice had left him in the best of spirits-the way
he had been after the young boy with the blond hair came to visit him.
'A nice girl,' Denker said, his words muffled by a mouthful of carrots and
peas.
'Oh yes-'
(you must sit down)
'- Felice, you mean. She's (and tell us all about it.)
'very sweet.'
(tell us everything. Omit nothing.)
He looked down at his own supper, suddenly remembering how it got to
be in the camps after a while. At first you would have killed for a scrap of
meat, no matter how maggoty or green with decay. But after a while, that
crazy hunger went away and your belly lay inside your middle like a small
grey rock. You felt you would never be hungry again.
Until someone showed you food.
('tell us everything, my friend. Omit nothing. You must sit down and tell
us AAALLLLL about it.')
The main course on Morris's plastic hospital tray was hamburger. Why
should it suddenly make him think of lamb? Not mutton, not chops-mutton
was often stringy, chops often tough, and a person whose teeth had rotted
out like old stumps would perhaps not be overly tempted by mutton or a
chop. No, what he thought of was a savoury lamb stew, gravy-rich and full
of vegetables. Soft, tasty vegetables. Why think of lamb stew? Why, unless-
The door banged open. It was Lydia, her face rosy with smiles. An
aluminium crutch was propped in her armpit and she was walking like
Marshall Dillon's friend Chester. 'Morris? she trilled. Trailing her and
looking just as tremulously happy was Emma Rogan from next door.
Mr Denker, startled, dropped his fork. He cursed softly under his breath
and picked it up off the floor with a wince.
'It's so WONDERFUL!' Lydia was almost baying with excitement. 'I
called Emma and asked her if we could come tonight instead of tomorrow, I
had the crutch already, and I said, "Em", I said, "if I can't bear this agony
for Morris, what kind of wife am I to him?"
Those are my very words, aren't they, Emma?'
Emma Rogan, perhaps remembering that her collie pup had caused at
least some of the problem, nodded eagerly.
'So I called the hospital,' Lydia said, shrugging her coat off and settling in
for a good long visit, 'and they said it was past visiting hours but in my case
they would make an exception, except we couldn't stay too long because we
might bother Mr Denker. We aren't bothering you, are we, Mr Denker?'
'No, dear lady,' Mr Denker said resignedly.
'Sit down, Emma, take Mr Denker's chair, he's not using it. Here, Morris,
stop with the ice cream, you're slobbering it all over yourself, just like a
baby. Never mind, we'll have you up and around in no time. I'll feed it to
you. Goo-goo, ga-ga. Open wide over the teeth, over the gums look out,
stomach, here it comes! No, don't say a word, mommy knows best. Would
you look at him, Emma, he hardly has any hair left and I don't wonder,
thinking he might never walk again. It's God's mercy. I told him that
stepladder was wobbly. I said, "Morris," I said, "Come down off there
before-"'
She fed him ice cream and chattered for the next hour and by the time she
left, hobbling ostentatiously on the crutch while Emma held her other arm,
thoughts of lamb stew and voices echoing up through the years were the last
things in Morris Heisel's mind. He was exhausted. To say it had been a busy
day was putting it mildly. Morris fell deeply asleep.
He awoke sometime between three and four a. m. with a scream locked
behind
his lips.
Now he knew. He knew exactly where and exactly when he had been
acquainted with the man in the other bed. Except his name had not been
Denker then. Oh no, not at all.
He had awakened from the most terrible nightmare of his whole life.
Someone had given him and Lydia a monkey's paw, and they had wished
for money. Then, somehow, a Western Union boy in a Hitler Youth uniform
had been in the room with them. He handed Morris a telegram which read:
REGRET TO INFORM YOU BOTH DAUGHTERS DEAD STOP PATIN
CONCENTRATION CAMP STOP GREATEST REGRETS AT THIS
FINAL SOLUTION STOP COMMANDANTS LETTER FOLLOWS
STOP WILL TELL YOU EVERYTHING AND OMIT NOTHING STOP
PLEASE ACCEPT OUR CHECK FOR 100 REICHMARKS ON
DEPOSIT YOUR BANK TOMORROW STOP SIGNED ADOLF HITLER
CHANCELLOR.
A great wail from Lydia, and although she had never even seen Morris's
daughters, she held the monkey's paw high and wished for them to be
returned to life.
The room went dark. And suddenly, from outside, came the sound of
dragging, lurching footfalls.
Morris was down on his hands and knees in a darkness that suddenly
stank of smoke and gas and death. He was searching for the paw. One wish
left If he could find the paw he could wish this dreadful dream away. He
would spare himself the sight of his daughters, thin as scarecrows, their
eyes deep wounded holes, their numbers burning on the scant flesh of their
arms.
Hammering on the door, a perfect fusillade of blows.
In the nightmare, his search for the paw became ever more frenzied, but
it bore no fruit. It seemed to go on for years. And then, behind him, the door
crashed open. No, he thought I won't look. I'll close my eyes. Rip them
from my head If I have to, but I won't look.
But he did look. He had to look. In the dream it was as if huge hands had
grasped his head and wrenched it around.
It was not his daughters standing in the doorway; it was Denker. A much
younger Denker, a Denker who wore a Nazi SS uniform, the cap with its
lightning-bolt insignia cocked rakishly to one side. His buttons gleamed
heartlessly, his boots were polished to a killing gloss.
Clasped in his arms was a huge and slowly bubbling pot of lamb stew.
And the dream-Denker, smiling his dark, suave smile, said: You must sit
down and tell us all about it-as one friend to another, eh? We have heard
that gold has been hidden. That tobacco has been hoarded. That it was not
food-poisoning with Schneibel at all but powdered glass in his supper two
nights ago. You must not insult our intelligence by pretending you know
nothing. You know EVERYTHING. So tell it all. Omit nothing.
And in the dark, smelling the maddening aroma of the stew, he told them
everything. His stomach, which had been a small grey rock, was now a
raving tiger. Words spilled helplessly from his lips. They spewed from him
in the senseless sermon of a lunatic, truth and falsehood all mixed up
together.
Brodin has his mother's wedding ring taped below his scrotum!
("you must sit down')
Laslo and Herman Dorsky have talked about rushing guard tower number
three!
('and tell us everything!')
Rachel Tannenbaum's husband has tobacco, he gave the guard who
comes on after Zeickert, the one they call Booger-Eater because he is
always picking his nose and then putting his fingers in his mouth,
Tannenbaum gave some of it to Booger-Eater so he wouldn't take his wife's
pearl earrings!
('oh that makes no sense at all you've mixed up two different stories I
think but that's all right quite all right we'd rather have you mix up two
stories than omit one completely you must omit NOTHING!')
There is a man who has been calling out his dead son's name in order to
get double rations!
('tell us his name')
I don't know it but I can point him out to you please yes I can show him
to you I will I will I will I ('tell us everything you know') will I will I will I
will I will I will I will I Until he swam up into consciousness with a scream
in his throat like fire.
Trembling uncontrollably, he looked at the sleeping form in the other
bed. He found himself staring particularly at the wrinkled, caved-in mouth.
Old tiger with no teeth.
Ancient and vicious rogue elephant with one tusk gone and the other
rooted loose in its socket Senile monster.
'Oh my God,' Morris Heisel whispered. His voice was high and faint,
inaudible to anyone but himself. Tears trickled down his cheeks towards his
ears. 'Oh dear God, the man who murdered my wife and my daughters is
sleeping in the same room with me, my God, oh dear dear God, he is here
with me now in this room.'
The tears began to flow faster now-tears of rage and horror, hot, scalding.
He trembled and waited for morning, and morning did not come for an
age.
21
The next day, Monday, Todd was up at six o'clock in the morning and
poking listlessly at a scrambled egg he had fixed for himself when his father
came down still dressed in his monogrammed bathrobe and slippers.
'Mumph,' he said to Todd, going past him to the refrigerator for orange
juice.
Todd grunted back without looking up from his book, one of the 87th
Squad mysteries.
He had been lucky enough to land a summer job with a landscaping outfit
that operated out of Sausalito. That would have been much too far to
commute ordinarily, even if one of his parents had been willing to loan him
a car for the summer (neither was), but his father was working on-site not
far from there, and he was able to drop Todd off at a bus stop on his way
and pick him up at the same place on his way back. Todd was less than wild
about the arrangement; he didn't like riding home from work with his father
and absolutely detested riding to work with him in the morning. It was in
the mornings that he felt the most naked, when the wall between what he
was and what he might be seemed the thinnest. It was worse after a night of
bad dreams, but even if no dreams had come in the night, it was bad. One
morning he realized with a fright so sudden it was almost terror that he had
been seriously considering reaching across his father's briefcase, grabbing
the wheel of the Porsche, and sending them corkscrewing into the two
express lanes, cutting a swath of destruction through the morning
commuters.
'You want another egg, Todd-O?'
'No thanks, dad.' Dick Bowden ate them fried. How could anyone stand
to eat a fried egg? On the grill of the Jenn-Aire for two minutes, then over
easy. What you got on your plate at the end looked like a giant dead eye
with a cataract over it, an eye that would bleed orange when you poked it
with your fork.
He pushed his scrambled egg away. He had barely touched it.
Outside, the morning paper slapped the step.
His father finished cooking, turned off the grill, and came to the table.
'Not hungry this morning, Todd-O?'
You call me that one more time and I'm going to stick my knife right up
your fucking nose Dad-O.
'Not much appetite, I guess.'
Dick grinned affectionately at his son; there was still a tiny dab of
shaving cream on the boy's right ear. 'Betty Trask stole your appetite. That's
my guess.'
'Yeah, maybe that's it.' He offered a wan smile that vanished as soon as
his father went down the stairs from the breakfast nook to get the paper.
Would it wake you up if I told you what a cunt she is, Dad-O? How about if
I said, 'Oh, by the way, did you know your good friend Ray Trask's
daughter is one of the biggest sluts in Santa Donate? She'd kiss her own
twat If she was double-jointed, Dad-O. That's how much she thinks of it.
Just a stinking little slut. Two lines of coke and she's yours for the night.
And If you don't happen to have any coke, she's still yours for the night.
She'd fuck a dog If she couldn't get a man.' Think that'd wake you up, Dad-
O? Get you a flying start on the day?
He pushed the thoughts away viciously, knowing they wouldn't stay
gone.
His father came back with the paper. Todd glimpsed the headline: SPY
TRIALS CLOSER, STATE DEPARTMENT SOURCE SAYS.
Dick sat down. 'Betty's a fine-looking girl,' he said. 'She reminds me of
your mother when I first met her.'
'Is that so?'
'Pretty young fresh.' Dick Bowden's eyes had gone vague. Now they
came back, focusing almost anxiously on his son. 'Not that your mother isn't
still a fine-looking woman. But at that age a girl has a certain glow, I
guess you'd say. It's there for a while, and then it's gone.' He shrugged and
opened the paper. 'C'est la vie, I guess.'
She's a bitch in heat. Maybe that's what makes her glow.
'You're treating her right, aren't you, Todd-O?' His father was making his
usual rapid trip through the paper towards the sports pages. 'Not getting too
fresh?'
'Everything's cool, dad.'
(if he doesn't stop pretty soon I'll I'll do something. Scream. Throw
his coffee in his face. Something.)
'Ray thinks you're a fine boy,' Dick said absently. He had at last reached
the sports. He became absorbed. There was blessed silence at the breakfast
table.
Betty Trask had been all over him the very first time they went out. He
had taken her to the local lover's lane after the movie because he knew it
would be expected of him; they could swap spits for half an hour or so and
have all the right things to tell their respective friends the next day. She
could roll her eyes and tell how she had fought off his advances -boys were
so tiresome, really, and she never fucked on the first date, she wasn't that
kind of girl. Her friends would agree and then all of them would troop into
the girls' room and do whatever it was they did in there-put on fresh
makeup, smoke Tampax, whatever.
And for a guy well, you had to make out. You had to get at least to
second base and try for third. Because there were reputations and
reputations. Todd couldn't have cared less about having a stud reputation;
he only wanted a reputation for being normal. And if you didn't at least try,
word got around. People started to wonder if you were all right.
So he took them up on Jane's Hill, kissed them, felt their tits, went a little
further than that if they would allow it. And that was it. The girl would stop
him, he would put up a little goodnatured argument, and then take her
home. No worries about what might be said in the girls' room the next day.
No worries that anyone was going to think Todd Bowden was anything but
normal. Except-Except Betty Trask was the kind of girl who fucked on the
first date. On every date. And in between dates.
The first time had been a month or so before the goddam Nazi's heart
attack, and Todd thought he had done pretty well for a virgin perhaps for
the same reason a young pitcher will do well if he's tapped to throw the
biggest game of the year with no
forewarning. There had been no time to worry, to get all strung up about
it Always before, Todd had been able to sense when a girl had made up her
mind that on the next date she would just allow herself to be carried away.
He was aware that he was personable and that both his looks and his
prospects were good. The kind of boy their cunty mothers regarded as 'a
good catch'. And when he sensed that physical capitulation was about to
happen, he would start dating some other girl. And whatever it said about
his personality, Todd was able to admit to himself that if he ever started
dating a truly frigid girl, he would probably be happy to date her for years
to come. Maybe even marry her.
But the first time with Betty had gone fairly well-she was no virgin, even
if he was. She had to help him get his cock into her, but she seemed to take
that as a matter of course.
And halfway through the act itself she had gurgled up from the blanket
they were lying on: 'I just love to fuck!' It was the tone of voice another girl
might have used to express her love for strawberry whirl ice cream.
Later encounters-there had been five of them (five and a half, he
supposed, if you wanted to count last night)-hadn't been so good. They had,
in fact, gotten worse at what seemed an exponential rate although he didn't
believe even now that Betty had been aware of that (at least not until last
night). In fact, quite the opposite. Betty apparently believed she had found
the battering-ram of her dreams.
Todd hadn't felt any of the things he was supposed to feel at a time like
that. Kissing her lips was like kissing warm but uncooked liver. Having her
tongue in his mouth only made him wonder what kind of germs she was
carrying, and sometimes he thought he could smell her fillings-an
unpleasant metallic odour, like chrome. Her breasts were bags of meat. No
more.
Todd had done it twice more with her before Dussander's heart attack.
Each time he had more trouble getting erect In both cases he had finally
succeeded by using a fantasy. She was stripped naked in front of all their
friends. Crying. Todd was forcing her to walk up and down between them
while he cried out: Show your tits! Let them see your snatch, you cheap
slut! Spread your cheeks! That's right, bend over and SPREAD them!
Betty's appreciation was not at all surprising. He was a very good lover, not
in spite of his problems but because of them. Getting hard was only the first
step. Once you achieved erection, you had to have an orgasm. The fourth
time they had done it-this was three days after Dussander's heart attack-he
had pounded away at her for over ten minutes. Betty Trask thought she had
died and gone to heaven; she had three orgasms and was trying for a fourth
when Todd recalled an old fantasy what was, in fact, the First Fantasy. The
girl on the table, clamped and helpless. The huge dildo. The rubber
squeeze-bulb. Only now, desperate and sweaty and almost insane with his
desire to come and get this horror over with, the face of the girl on the table
became Betty's face. That brought on a joyless, rubbery spasm that he
supposed was, technically, at least, an orgasm. A moment later Betty was
whispering in his ear, her breath warm and redolent of Juicy Fruit gum:
'Lover, you do me any old time. Just call me.' Todd had nearly groaned
aloud.
The nub of his dilemma was this: Wouldn't his reputation suffer if he
broke off with a girl who so obviously wanted to put out for him? Wouldn't
people wonder why? Part of him said they would not. He remembered
walking down the hall behind two senior boys during his freshman year and
hearing one of them tell the other he had broken off with his girlfriend. The
other wanted to know why. 'Fucked 'er out,' the first said, and both of them
bellowed goatish laughter.
If someone asks me why I dropped her, I'll just say I fucked her out. But
what if she says we only did it five times? Is that enough? What? How
much? How many? Who'll talk? What'll they say?
So his mind ran on, as restless as a hungry rat in an insoluble maze. He
was vaguely aware that he was turning a minor problem into a big problem,
and that his very inability to solve the problem had something to say about
how shaky he had gotten. But knowing it brought him no fresh ability to
change his behaviour, and he sank into a black depression.
College. College was the answer. College offered an excuse to break with
Betty that no one could question. But September seemed so far away.
The fifth time it had taken him almost twenty minutes to get hard, but
Betty had proclaimed the experience well worth the wait. And then, last
night, he hadn't been able to perform at all.
'What are you, anyway?' Betty had asked petulantly. After twenty
minutes of manipulating his lax penis, she was dishevelled and out of
patience. 'Are you one of those AC/DC guys'?'
He very nearly strangled her on the spot. And if he'd had his.30-.30-
'Well, I'll be a son of a gun! Congratulations, son!'
'Huh?' He looked up and out of his black study.
'You made the Southern Cat High School All-Stars!' His father was
grinning with pride and pleasure.
'Is that so?' For a moment he hardly knew what his father was talking
about; he had to grope for the meaning of the words. 'Say, yeah, Coach
Haller mentioned something to me about that at the end of the year. Said he
was putting me and Billy DeLyons up. I never expected anything to
happen.'
'Well Jesus, you don't seem very excited about it!'
'I'm still trying (who gives a ripe fuck?) to get used to the idea.' With a
huge effort, he managed a grin. 'Can I see the article?' His father handed the
paper across the table to Todd and got to his feet 'I'm going to wake Monica
up. She's got to see this before we leave.' No, God -I can't face both of them
this morning.
'Aw, don't do that You know she won't be able to get back to sleep if you
wake her up. Well leave it for her on the table.'
'Yes, I suppose we could do that. You're a damned thoughtful boy, Todd.'
He clapped Todd on the back, and Todd squeezed his eyes closed. At the
same time he shrugged his shoulders in an aw-shucks gesture that made his
father laugh. Todd opened his eyes again and looked at the paper.
4 BOYS NAMED TO SOUTHERN CAL ALL-STARS, the headline
read. Beneath were pictures of them in their uniforms-the catcher and left-
fielder from Fairview High, the jigaboo shortstop from Mountford, and
Todd to the far right, grinning openly out at the world from beneath the bill
of his baseball cap. He read the story and saw that Billy DeLyons had made
the second squad. That, at least, was something to feel happy about
DeLyons could claim he was a Methodist until his tongue fell out, if it made
him feel good, but he wasn't fooling Todd. He knew perfectly well what
Billy DeLyons was. Maybe he ought to introduce him to Betty Trask, she
was another sheeny. He had wondered about that for a long time, and last
night he had decided for sure. The Trasks were passing for white. One look
at her nose and that olive complexion-her old man's was even worse-and
you knew. That was probably why he hadn't been able to get it up. It was
simple: his cock had known the difference before his brain. Who did they
think they were kidding, calling themselves Trask? 'Congratulations again,
son.'
He looked up and first saw his father's hand stuck out, then his father's
foolishly grinning face.
Your buddy Trask is a yid! He heard himself yelling into his father's face.
That's why I was impotent with his slut of a daughter last night! That's the
reason! Then, on the heels of that, the cold voice that sometimes came at
moments like this rose up from deep inside him, shutting off the rising flood
of irrationality, as if (GET HOLD OF YOURSELF RIGHT NOW) behind
steel gates.
He took his father's hand and shook it. Smiled guilelessly into his father's
proud face. Said: 'Jeez, thanks, dad.'
They left that page of the newspaper folded back and a note for Monica,
which Dick insisted Todd write and sign: Your All-Star Son, Todd.
22
Ed French, aka 'Pucker' French, aka Sneaker Pete and The Ked Man, also
aka Rubber Ed French, was in the small and lovely seaside town of San
Remo for a guidance counsellors' convention. It was a waste of time if ever
there had been one-all guidance counsellors could ever agree on was not to
agree on anything-and he grew bored with the papers, seminars, and
discussion periods after a single day. Halfway through the second day, he
discovered he was also bored with San Remo, and that of the adjectives
small, lovely, and seaside, the key adjective was probably small. Gorgeous
views and redwood trees aside, San Remo didn't have a movie theatre or a
bowling alley, and Ed hadn't wanted to go in the place's only bar-it had a
dirt parking lot filled with pick-up trucks, and most of the pick-ups had
Reagan stickers on their rusty bumpers and tailgates. He wasn't afraid of
being picked on, but he hadn't wanted to spend an evening looking at men
in cowboy hats and listening to Loretta Lynn on the jukebox. So here he
was on the third day of a convention which stretched out over an incredible
four days; here he was in room 217 of the Holiday Inn, his wife and
daughter at home, the TV broken, an unpleasant smell hanging around in
the bathroom. There was a swimming pool, but his eczema was so bad this
summer that he wouldn't have been caught dead in a bathing suit. From the
shins down he looked like a leper. He had an hour before the next workshop
(Helping the Vocally Challenged Child-what they meant was doing
something for kids who stuttered or who had cleft palates, but we wouldn't
want to come right out and say that, Christ no, someone might lower our
salaries), he had eaten lunch at San Remo's only restaurant, he didn't feel
like a nap, and the TV's one station was showing a rerun of Bewitched.
So he sat down with the telephone book and began to flip through it
aimlessly, hardly aware of what he was doing, wondering distantly if he
knew anyone crazy enough about either small, lovely, or seaside to live in
San Remo. He supposed this was what all the bored people in all the
Holiday Inns all over the world ended up doing-looking for a forgotten
friend or relative to call up on the phone. It was that, Bewitched, or the
Gideon Bible. And if you did happen to get hold of somebody, what the hell
did you say? 'Frank! How the hell are you? And by the way, which was it-
small, lovely, or seaside?' Sure. Right Give that man a cigar and set him on
fire.
Yet, as he lay on the bed flipping through the thin San Remo white pages
and half-scanning the columns, it seemed to him that he did know
somebody in San Remo. A book salesman? One of Sondra's nieces or
nephews, of which there were marching
battalions? A poker buddy from college? The relative of a student? That
seemed to ring a bell, but he couldn't fine it down any more tightly.
He kept thumbing, and found he was sleepy after all. He had almost
dozed off when it came to him and he sat up, wide awake again.
Lord Peter!
They were rerunning those Wimsey stories on PBS just lately-Clouds of
Witness, Murder Must Advertise, The Nine Tailors. He and Sondra were
hooked. A man named Ian Carmichael played Wimsey, and Sondra was
nuts for him. So nuts, in fact, that Ed, who didn't think Carmichael looked
like Lord Peter at all, actually became quite irritated. 'Sandy, the shape of
his face is all wrong. And he's wearing false teeth, for heaven's sake!'
'Poo,' Sondra had replied airily from the couch where she was curled up.
'You're just jealous. He's so handsome.'
'Daddy's jealous, Daddy's jealous,' little Norma sang, prancing around the
living room in her duck pyjamas.
'You should have been in bed an hour ago,' Ed told her, gazing at his
daughter with a jaundiced eye. 'And if I keep noticing you're here, I'll
probably remember that you aren't there.'
Little Norma was momentarily abashed. Ed turned back to Sondra. 'I
remember back three or four years ago. I had a kid named Todd Bowden,
and his grandfather came in for a conference. Now that guy looked like
Wimsey. A very old Wimsey, but the shape of his face was right, and -'
'Wim-zee, Wim-zee, Dim-zee, Jim-zee,' little Norma sang. ' Wim-zee,
Dim-zee, doodle-oodle-ooo-doo -'
'Shh, both of you,' Sondra said. 'I think he's the most beautiful man.'
Irritating woman! But hadn't Todd Bowden's grandfather retired to San
Remo? Sure. Todd had been one of the brightest boys in that year's ninth
grade class. Then, all at once, his grades had gone to hell. The old man had
come in, told a familiar tale of marital difficulties, and had persuaded Ed to
let the situation alone for a while and see if things didn't straighten
themselves out. Ed's view was that the old laissez-faire bit didn't work -if
you told a teenage kid to root, hog, or die, the kid usually died. But the old
man had been almost eerily persuasive (it was the resemblance to Wimsey,
perhaps), and Ed had agreed to give Todd to the end of the next Flunk Card
period. And damned if Todd hadn't pulled through. The old man must have
gone right through the whole family and really kicked some ass, Ed
thought. He looked like the type who not only could do it, but who might
derive a certain dour pleasure from it. Then, just two days ago, he had seen
Todd's picture in the paper-he had made the Southern Cal All-Stars in
baseball. No mean feat when you considered that about five hundred boys
were nominated each spring. He supposed he might never have come up
with the grandfather's name if he hadn't seen the picture. He flickered
through the white pages more purposefully now, ran his finger down a
column of fine type, and there it was. BOWDEN, VICTOR S.403 Ridge
Lane. Ed dialled the number and it rang several times at the other end. He
was just about to hang up when an old man answered. 'Hello?'
'Hello, Mr Bowden. Ed French. From Santa Donate Junior High.'
'Yes?' Politeness, but no more. Certainly no recognition. Well, the old guy
was four years further along (weren't they all!) and things undoubtedly
slipped his mind from time to time.
'Do you remember me, sir?'
'Should I?' Bowden's voice was cautious, and Ed smiled. The old man
forgot things but he didn't want anybody to know if he could help it His
own old man had been that way when his hearing started to go.
'I was your grandson Todd's guidance counsellor at S. D J. H. S. I called
to congratulate you. He sure tore up the pea-patch when he got to high
school, didn't he? And now he's All-Conference to top it off. Wow!'
'Todd!' The old man said, his voice brightening immediately. 'Yes, he
certainly did a fine job, didn't he? Second in his class! And the girl who was
ahead of him took the business courses.' A sniff of disdain in the old man's
voice. 'My son called and offered to take me to Todd's commencement, but
I'm in a wheelchair now. I broke my hip last January. I didn't want to go in a
wheelchair. But I have his graduation picture right in the hall, you bet!
Todd's made his parents very proud. And me, of course.'
'Yes, I guess we got him over the hump,' Ed said. He was smiling as he
said it, but his smile was a trifle puzzled -somehow Todd's grandfather
didn't sound the same. But it had been a long time ago, of course.
'Hump? What hump?'
"That little talk we had. When Todd was having problems with his
course-work. Back in ninth.'
'I'm not following you,' the old man said slowly. 'I would never presume
to speak for Richard's son. It would cause trouble ho-ho, you don't know
how much trouble it would cause. You've made a mistake, young fellow.'
'But-'
'Some sort of mistake. Got me confused with another student and another
grandfather, I imagine.'
Ed was moderately thunderstruck. For one of the few times in his life, he
could not think of a single thing to say. If there was confusion, it sure wasn't
on his part.
'Well,' Bowden said doubtfully, 'it was nice of you to call, Mr-'
Ed found his tongue. 'I'm right here in town, Mr Bowden. It's a
convention. Guidance counsellors. I'll be done around ten tomorrow
morning, after the final paper is read.
'Could I come around to' He consulted the phone book again. ' to
Ridge Lane and see you for a few minutes?'
'What in the world for?'
'Just curiosity, I guess. It's all water over the dam now. But about four
years ago, Todd got himself into a real crack with his grades. They were so
bad I had to send a letter home with his report-card requesting a conference
with a parent, or, ideally, with both of his parents. What I got was his
grandfather, a very pleasant man named Victor Bowden.'
'But I've already told you -'
'Yes. I know. Just the same, I talked to somebody claiming to be Todd's
grandfather. It doesn't matter much now, I suppose, but seeing is believing.
I'd only take a few minutes of your time. It's all I can take, because I'm
expected home by suppertime.'
'Time is all I have,' Bowden said, a bit ruefully. 'I'll be here all day. You're
welcome to stop in.'
Ed thanked him, said goodbye, and hung up. He sat on the end of the bed,
staring thoughtfully at the telephone. After a while he got up and took a
pack of Phillies Cheroots from the sport coat hanging on the back of the
desk chair. He ought to go; there was a workshop, and if he wasn't there, he
would be missed. He lit his
Cheroot with a Holiday Inn match and dropped the burnt stub into a
Holiday Inn ashtray. He went to the Holiday Inn window and looked
blankly out into the Holiday Inn courtyard.
It doesn't matter much now, he had told Bowden, but it mattered to him.
He wasn't used to being sold a bill of goods by one of his kids and this
unexpected news upset him.
Technically he supposed it could still turn out to be a case of an old man's
senility, but Victor Bowden hadn't sounded as if he was drooling in his
beard yet And, damn it, he didn't sound the same.
Had Todd Bowden jobbed him?
He decided it could have been done. Theoretically, at least. Especially by
a bright boy like Todd. He could have jobbed everyone, not just Ed French.
He could have forged his mother or father's name to the Flunk Cards he had
been issued during his bad patch. Lots of kids discovered a latent forging
ability when they got Flunk Cards. He could have used ink eradicator on his
second and third quarter reports, changing the grades up for his parents and
then back down again so that his home room teacher wouldn't notice
anything weird if he or she glanced at his card. The double application of
eradicator would be visible to someone who was really looking, but home
room teachers carried an average of sixty students each. They were lucky if
they could get the entire roll called before the first bell, let alone spot-
checking returned cards for tampering.
As for Todd's final class standing, it would have dipped perhaps no more
than three points overall-two bad marking periods out of a total of twelve.
His other grades had been lopsidedly good enough to make up most of the
difference. And how many parents drop by the school to look at the student
records kept by the California Department of Education? Especially the
parents of a bright student like Todd Bowden?
Frown lines appeared on Ed French's normally smooth forehead.
It doesn't matter much now. That was nothing but the truth. Todd's high
school work had been exemplary; there was no way in the world you could
fake a 94 average. The boy was going on to Berkeley, the newspaper article
had said, and Ed supposed his folks were damned proud-as they had every
right to be. More and more it seemed to Ed that there was a vicious
downside to American life, a greased skid of opportunism, cut corners, easy
drugs, easy sex, a morality that grew cloudier each year. When your kid got
through in standout style, parents had a right to be proud.
It doesn't matter now but who was his frigging grandfather?
That kept sticking into him. Who, indeed? Had Todd Bowden gone to the
local branch office of the Screen Actors' Guild and hung a notice on the
bulletin board? YOUNG MAN IN GRADES TROUBLE NEEDS OLDER
MAN, PREF. 70-80 YRS, TO GIVE BOFFO PERFORMANCE AS
GRANDFATHER, WILL PAY UNION SCALE? Uh-uh.
No way, Jose. And just what sort of adult would have fallen in with such
a crazy conspiracy, and for what reason?
Ed French, aka Pucker, aka Rubber Ed, just didn't know. And because it
didn't really matter, he stubbed out his Cheroot and went to his workshop.
But his attention kept wandering.
The next day he drove over to Ridge Lane and had a long talk with Victor
Bowden. They discussed grapes; they discussed the retail grocery business
and how the big chain stores were pushing the little guys out; they
discussed the hostage situation in Iran (that summer everyone discussed the
hostage situation in Iran); they
discussed the political climate in southern California. Mr Bowden offered
Ed a glass of wine. Ed accepted with pleasure.
He felt that he needed a glass of wine, even if it was only 10:40 in the
morning. Victor Bowden looked as much like Peter Wimsey as a machine
gun looks like a shillelagh.
Victor Bowden had no trace of the faint accent Ed remembered, and he
was quite fat. The man who had purported to be Todd's grandfather had
been whip-thin. Before leaving, Ed told him: 'I'd appreciate it if you
wouldn't mention any of this to Mr. or Mrs. Bowden. There may be a
perfectly reasonable explanation for all of it and even if there isn't, it's all
in the past.'
'Sometimes,' Bowden said, holding his glass of wine up to the sun and
admiring its rich dark colour, 'the past don't rest so easy. Why else do
people study history?' Ed smiled uneasily and said nothing.
'But don't you worry. I never meddle in Richard's affairs. And Todd is a
good boy. Salutatorian of his class he must be a good boy. Am I right?'
'As rain,' Ed French said heartily, and then asked for another glass of
wine.
23
Dussander's sleep was uneasy; he lay in a trench of bad dreams. They
were breaking down the fence. Thousands, perhaps millions of them. They
ran out of the Jungle and threw themselves against the electrified barbed
wire and now it was beginning to lean ominously inward. Some of the
strands had given way and now coiled uneasily on the packed earth of the
parade ground, squirting blue sparks. And still there was no end to them, no
end. The Fuehrer was as mad as Rommel had claimed If he thought now -if
he had ever thought -there could be a final solution to this problem. There
were billions of them; they filled the universe; and they were all after him.
'Old man. Wake up, old man. Dussander. Wake up, old man, wake up.' At
first he thought this was the voice of the dream.
Spoken in German; it had to be part of the dream. That was why the
voice was so terrifying, of course. If he awoke he would escape it, so he
swam upwards The man was sitting by his bed on a chair that had been
turned around backwards, a real man. 'Wake up, old man,' this visitor was
saying. He was young-no more than thirty. His eyes were dark and studious
behind plain steel-framed glasses. His brown hair was longish, collar-
length, and for a confused moment Dussander thought it was the boy in a
disguise. But this was not the boy, wearing a rather old-fashioned blue suit
much too hot for the California climate. There was a small silver pin on one
lapel of the suit. Silver, the metal you used to kill vampires and
werewolves. It was a Jewish star. 'Are you speaking to me?' Dussander
asked in German. 'Who else? Your roommate is gone.'
'Heisel? Yes. He went home yesterday.'
'Are you awake now?'
'Of course. But you've apparently mistaken me for someone else. My
name is Arthur Denker. Perhaps you have the wrong room.'
'My name is Weiskopf. And yours is Kurt Dussander.'
Dussander wanted to lick his lips but didn't. Just possibly this was still all
part of the dream- a new phase, no more. Bring me a wino and a steak-
knife, Mr. Jewish Star in the Lapel, and I'll blow you away like smoke, 'I
know no Dussander,' he told the young man. 'I don't understand you. Shall I
ring for the nurse?'
'You understand,' Weiskopf said. He shifted position slightly and brushed
a lock of hair from his forehead. The prosiness of this gesture dispelled
Dussander's last hope. 'Heisel,' Weiskopf said, and pointed at the empty
bed. 'Heisel, Dussander, Weiskopf none of these names mean anything to
me.'
'Heisei fell off a ladder while he was nailing a new gutter onto the side of
his
house,'
Weiskopf said. 'He broke his back. He may never walk again.
Unfortunate. But that was not the only tragedy of his life. He was an inmate
of Patin, where he lost his wife and daughters. Patin, which you
commanded.'
'I think you are insane,' Dussander said. 'My name is Arthur Denker. I
came to this country when my wife died. Before that I was -'
'Spare me your tale,' Weiskopf said, raising a hand. 'He has not forgotten
your face. This face.'
Weiskopf flicked a photograph into Dussander's face like a magician
doing a trick. It was one of the two the boy had shown him years ago. A
young Dussander in a jauntily cocked SS cap, swagger stick held firmly
under one arm.
Dussander spoke slowly, in English now, enunciating carefully.
'During the war I was a factory machinist. My job was to oversee the
manufacture of drive-columns and power-trains for armoured cars and
trucks. Later I helped to build Tiger tanks. My reserve unit was called up
during the battle of Berlin and I fought honorably, if briefly. After the war I
worked in the Essen Motor Works until -'
'- until it became necessary for you to run away to South America. With
your gold that had been melted down from Jewish teeth and your silver
melted down from Jewish jewellery and your numbered Swiss bank
account. Mr Heisel went home a happy man, you know. Oh, he had had a
bad moment when he woke up in the dark and realized with whom he was
sharing a room. But he feels better now. He feels that God allowed him the
sublime privilege of breaking his back so that he could be instrumental in
the capture of one of the greatest butchers of human beings to ever live.'
Dussander spoke slowly, enunciating carefully.
'During the war I was a factory machinist -'
'Oh, why not drop it? Your papers will not stand up to a serious
examination. I know it and you know it. You are found out'
'My job was to oversee the manufacture of-'
'Of corpses! One way or another, you will be in Tel Aviv before
Christmas. The authorities are cooperating with us this time, Dussander.
The Americans want to make us happy, and you are one of the things that
will make us happy.'
'- the manufacture of drive-columns and power-trains for armoured cars
and trucks. Later I helped to build Tiger tanks.'
'Why be tiresome? Why drag it out?'
'My reserve unit was called up -'
'Very well then. You'll see me again. Soon.'
Weiskopf rose. He left the room. For a moment his shadow bobbed on the
wall and then that was gone, too. Dussander closed his eyes. He wondered
if Weiskopf could be telling the truth about American cooperation. Three
years ago, when oil was tight in America, he would have believed it. But
the stupid Iranian militants had hardened American support for Israel. It
was possible. And what did it matter?
One way or the other, legal or illegal, Weiskopf and his colleagues would
have him. On the subject of Nazis they were intransigent, and on the subject
of the camps they were lunatics.
He was trembling all over. But he knew what he must do now.
24
The school records for the pupils who had passed through Santa Donate
Junior High were kept in an old, rambling warehouse on the north side. It
was not far from the abandoned trainyards. It was dark and echoing and it
smelled of wax and polish and 999 Industrial Cleaner-it was also the school
department's custodial warehouse.
Ed French got there around four in the afternoon with Norma in tow. A
janitor let them in, told Ed what he wanted was on the fourth floor, and
showed them to a creeping, clanking warehouse that frightened Norma into
a uncharacteristic silence.
She regained herself on the fourth floor, prancing and capering up and
down the dim aisles of stacked boxes and files while Ed searched for and
eventually found the files containing report-cards from 1975. He pulled the
second box and began to leaf through the Bs. BORK. BOSTWICK.
BOSWELL. BOWDEN, TODD. He pulled the card, shook his head
impatiently over it in the dim light, and took it across to one of the high,
dusty windows.
'Don't run around in here, honey,' he called over his shoulder.
'Why, daddy?'
'Because the trolls will get you,' he said, and held Todd's card up to the
light.
He saw it at once. This report card, in those files for four years now, had
been carefully, almost professionally, doctored.
'Jesus Christ,' Ed French muttered.
Trolls, trolls, trolls!' Norma sang gleefully, as she continued to dance up
and down the aisles.
25
Dussander walked carefully down the hospital corridor. He was still a bit
unsteady on his legs. He was wearing his blue bathrobe over his white
hospital johnny. It was night now, just after eight o'clock, and the nurses
were changing shifts. The next half hour would be confused-he had
observed that all the shift changes were confused. It was a time for
exchanging notes, gossip, and drinking coffee at the nurses' station, which
was just around the corner from the drinking fountain.
What he wanted was just across from the drinking fountain.
He was not noticed in the wide hallway, which at this hour reminded him
of a long and echoing train station minutes before a passenger train departs.
The walking wounded paraded slowly up and down, some dressed in robes
as he was, others holding the backs of their johnnies together. Disconnected
music came from half a dozen different transistor radios in half a dozen
different rooms. Visitors came and went A man laughed in one room and
another man seemed to be weeping across the hall. A doctor walked by with
his nose in a paperback novel.
Dussander went to the fountain, got a drink, wiped his mouth with his
cupped hand, and looked at the closed door across the hall. This door was
always locked at least, that was the theory. In practice he had observed
that it was sometimes both unlocked and unattended. Most often during the
chaotic half hour when the shifts were changing and the nurses were
gathered around the corner. Dussander had observed all of this with the
trained and wary eye of a man who has been on the jump for a long, long
time. He only wished he could observe the unmarked door for another week
or so, looking for dangerous breaks in the pattern-he would only have the
one chance. But he didn't have another week. His status as Werewolf in
Residence might not become known for another two or three days, but it
might happen tomorrow. He did not dare wait. When it came out, he would
be watched constantly.
He took another small drink, wiped his mouth again, and looked both
ways. Then, casually, with no effort of concealment, he stepped across the
hall, turned the knob, and walked into the drug closet. If the woman in
charge had happened to already be behind her desk, he was only
nearsighted Mr. Denker. So sorry, dear lady, I thought it was the WC. Stupid
of me.
But the drug closet was empty.
He ran his eye over the top shelf at his left. Nothing but eyedrops and
eardrops. Second shelf: laxatives, suppositories. On the third shelf he saw
Seconal and Veronal. He slipped a bottle of Seconals into the pocket of his
robe. Then he went back to the door and stepped out without looking
around, a puzzled smile on his face-that certainly wasn't the WC, was it?
There it was, right next to the drinking fountain. Stupid me!
He crossed to the door labelled MEN, went inside, and washed his hands.
Then he went back down the hall to the semi-private room that was now
completely private since the departure of the illustrious Mr Heisel. On the
table between the beds was a glass and a plastic pitcher filled with water.
Pity there was no bourbon; really, it was a shame. But the pills would float
him off just as nicely no matter how they were washed down.
'Morris Heisel, salud,' he said with a faint smile, and poured himself a
glass of
water.
After all those years of jumping at shadows, of seeing faces that looked
familiar on park benches or in restaurants or bus terminals, he had finally
been recognized and turned in by a man he wouldn't have known from
Adam. It was almost funny. He had barely spared Heisel two glances,
Heisel and his broken back from God. On second thought, it wasn't almost
funny; it was very funny.
He put three pills in his mouth, swallowed them with water, took three
more, then three more. In the room across the hall he could see two old men
hunched over a night-table, playing a grumpy game of cribbage. One of
them had a hernia, Dussander knew. What was the other? Gallstones?
Kidney stones? Tumour? Prostate? The horrors of old age.
They were legion.
He refilled his water glass but didn't take any more pills right away. Too
many could defeat his purpose. He might throw them up and they would
pump the residue out of his stomach, saving him for whatever indignities
the Americans and the Israelis could devise.
He had no intention of trying to take his life stupidly, like a hausfrau on a
crying jag.
When he began to get drowsy, he would take a few more. That would be
fine.
The quavering voice of one of the cribbage players came to him, thin and
triumphant: 'A double run of four for ten fifteens for eighteen and the
right jack for nineteen. How do you like those apples?'
'Don't worry,' the old man with the hernia said confidently. 'I got first
count. I'll peg out.'
Peg out, Dussander thought, sleepy now. An apt enough phrase-but the
Americans had a turn for idiom. I don't give a tin shit, get hip or get out,
stick it where the sun don't shine, money talks, nobody walks. Wonderful
idiom.
They thought they had him, but he was going to peg out before their very
eyes.
He found himself wishing, of all absurd things, that he could leave a note
for the boy.
Wishing he could tell him to be very careful. To listen to an old man who
had finally overstepped himself. He wished he could tell the boy that in the
end he, Dussander, had come to respect him, even if he could never like
him, and that talking to him had been better than listening to the run of his
own thoughts. But any note, no matter how innocent, might cast suspicion
on the boy, and Dussander did not want that. Oh, he would have a bad
month or two, waiting for some government agent to show up and question
him about a certain document that had been found in a safety deposit box
rented to Kurt Dussander, aka Arthur Denker but after a time, the boy
would come to believe he had been telling the truth. There was no need for
the boy to be touched by any of this, as long as he kept his head.
Dussander reached out with a hand that seemed to stretch for miles, got
the glass of water, and took another three pills. He put the glass back, closed
his eyes, and settled deeper into his soft, soft pillow. He had never felt so
much like sleeping, and his sleep would be long. It would be restful. Unless
there were dreams.
The thought shocked him. Dreams? Please God, no. Not those dreams.
Not for eternity, not with all possibility of awakening gone. Not-In sudden
terror, he tried to struggle awake. It seemed that hands were reaching
eagerly up out of the bed to grab htm, thin hands with hungry fingers. (!
NO!)
His thoughts broke up in a steepening spiral of darkness, and he rode
down that spiral as if down a greased slide, down and down, to whatever
dreams there are. His overdose was discovered at 1.35 a. m., and he was
pronounced dead fifteen minutes later. The nurse on duty was young and
had been susceptible to elderly Mr. Denker's slightly ironic courtliness. She
burst into tears. She was a Catholic, and she could not understand why such
a sweet old man, who had been getting better, would want to do such a
thing and damn his immortal soul to hell.
26
On Saturday morning in the Bowden household, nobody got up until at
least nine. This morning at 9.30, Todd and his father were reading at the
table and Monica, who was a slow waker, served them scrambled eggs,
juice, and coffee without speaking, still half in her dreams. Todd was
reading a paperback science fiction novel and Dick was absorbed in
Architectural Digest when the paper slapped against the door. 'Want me to
get it, dad?'
'I will.'
Dick brought it in, started to sip his coffee, and then choked on it as he
got a look at the front page.
'Dick, what's wrong?' Monica asked, hurrying towards him.
Dick coughed out coffee that had gone down the wrong pipe, and while
Todd looked at him over the top of his paperback in mild wonder, Monica
started to pound him on the back. On the third stroke, her eyes fell to the
paper's headline and she stopped in mid-stroke, as if playing statues. Her
eyes widened until it seemed they might actually fail onto the table.
'Holy God up in heaven!' Dick Bowden managed in a choked voice. 'Isn't
that I can't believe' Monica began, and then stopped. She looked at Todd.
'Oh, honey -'
His father was looking at him, too.
Alarmed now, Todd came around the table. 'What's the matter?'
'Mr Denker,' Dick said-it was all he could manage. Todd read the
headline and understood everything. In dark letters it read: FUGITIVE
NAZI COMMITS SUICIDE IN SANTA DONATO HOSPITAL. Below
were two photos, side by side. Todd had seen both of them before. One
showed Arthur Denker, six years younger and spryer. Todd knew it had
been taken by a hippie street photographer, and that the old man had bought
it only to make sure it didn't fall into the wrong hands by chance. The other
photo showed an SS officer named Kurt Dussander, swagger-stick cocked
jauntily (arrogantly, some might have said) under one arm, his cap cocked
to one side.
If they had the photograph the hippie had taken, they had been in his
house.
Todd skimmed the article, his mind whizzing frantically. No mention of
the winos. But the bodies would be found, and when they were, it would be
a worldwide story. PATIN COMMANDANT NEVER LOST HIS TOUCH,
HORROR IN NAZI'S BASEMENT.
HE NEVER STOPPED KILLING.
Todd Bowden swayed on his feet
Far away, echoing, he heard his mother cry sharply: 'Catch him, Dick!
He's fainting!'
The word (faintingfaintingfainting) repeated itself over and over. He
dimly felt his father's arm grab him, and then for a little while Todd felt
nothing, heard nothing at all.
27
Ed French was eating a Danish when he unfolded the paper. He coughed,
made a strange gagging sound, and spat dismembered pastry all over the
table.
'Eddie!' Sondra French said with some alarm. 'Are you okay?'
'Daddy's chokin', daddy's chokin',' little Norma proclaimed with nervous
good humour, and then happily joined her mother in slamming Ed on the
back. Ed barely felt the blows.
He was still goggling down at the newspaper.
'What's wrong, Eddie?' Sondra asked again.
'Him! Him!' Ed shouted, stabbing his finger down at the paper so hard
that his fingernail tore all the way through the A section. That man! Lord
Peter!'
'What in God's name are you t -'
'That's Todd Bowden's grandfather!'
'What? That war criminal? Eddie, that's crazy!'
'But it's him,' Ed almost moaned. 'Jesus Christ Almighty, that's him!'
Sondra French looked at the picture long and fixedly.
'He doesn't look like Peter Wimsey at all,' she said finally.
28
Todd, pale as window-glass, sat on a couch between his mother and
father.
Opposite them was a greying, polite police detective named Richler.
Todd's father had offered to call the police, but Todd had done it himself,
his voice cracking through the registers as it had done when he was
fourteen.
He finished his recital. It hadn't taken long. He spoke with a mechanical
colourlessness that scared the hell out of Monica. He was almost eighteen,
true enough, but he was still a boy in so many ways. This was going to scar
him forever.
'I read him oh, I don't know. Tom Jones. The Mill on the Floss. That
was a boring one.
I didn't think we'd ever get through it. Some stories by Hawthorne-I
remember he especially liked "The Great Stone Face" and "Young
Goodman Brown". We started The Pickwick Papers, but he didn't like it. He
said Dickens could only be funny when he was being serious, and Pickwick
was only kittenish. That was his word, kittenish. We got along the best with
Tom Jones. We both liked that one.'
'And that was four years ago,' Richler said.
'Yes. I kept stopping in to see him when I got the chance, but in high
school we were bussed across town and some of 'the kids got up a scratch
ball team there was more homework you know things just came up.'
'You had less time.'
'Less time, that's right. The work in high school was a lot harder making
the grades to get into college.'
'But Todd is a very apt pupil,' Monica said almost automatically. 'He
graduated salutatorian. We were so proud.'
'I'll bet you were,' Richler said with a warm smile. 'I've got two boys in
Fairview, down in the valley, and they're just about able to keep their sports
eligibility.' He turned back to Todd. 'You didn't read him any more books
after you started high school?'
'No. Once in a while I'd read him the paper. I'd come over and he'd ask
me what the headlines were. He was interested in Watergate when that was
going on. And he always wanted to know about the stock market, and the
print on that page used to drive him batshit-sorry, Mom.'
She patted his hand.
'I don't know why he was interested in the stocks, but he was.'
'He had a few stocks,' Richler said. 'That's how he was getting by. You
want to hear a really crazy coincidence? The man who made the
investments for him was convicted on a murder charge in the late forties.
Dussander had five different sets of ID salted around that house. He was a
cagey one, all right'
'I suppose he kept the stocks in a safe deposit box somewhere,' Todd
remarked.
'Pardon me?' Richler raised his eyebrows.
'His stocks,' Todd said. His father, who had also looked puzzled, now
nodded at Richler.
'His stock certificates were in a footlocker under his bed,' Richler said,
'along with that photo of him as Denker. Did he have a safety deposit box,
son? Did he ever say he did?'
Todd thought, and then shook his head. 'I just thought that was where you
kept your stocks. I don't know. This this whole thing has just you know
it blows my wheels.'
He shook his head in a dazed way that was perfectly real. He really was
dazed. Yet, little by little, he felt his instincts of self-preservation surfacing.
He felt a growing alertness, and the first stirrings of confidence. If
Dussander had really taken a safety deposit box in which to store his
insurance document, wouldn't he have transferred his stock certificates
there? And that photograph?
'We're working with the Israelis on this,' Richler said. 'In a very unofficial
way. I'd be grateful if you didn't mention that if you decide to see any press
people. They're real professionals. There's a man named Weiskopf who'd
like to talk to you tomorrow, Todd.
If that's okay by you and your folks.'
'I guess so,' Todd said, but he felt a touch of atavistic dread at the thought
of being sniffed over by the same hounds that had chased Dussander for the
last third of his life.
Dussander had had a healthy respect for them, and Todd knew he would
do well to keep that in mind.
'Mr and Mrs Bowden? Do you have any objections to Todd seeing Mr
Weiskopf?'
'Not if Todd doesn't,' Dick Bowden said. 'I'd like to be present, though.
I've read about these Mossad characters -'
'Weiskopf isn't Mossad. He's what the Israelis call a special operative. In
fact, he teaches Yiddish grammar-if you can believe that-and English
Literature. Also, he's written two novels.' Richler smiled.
Dick raised a hand, dismissing it 'Whatever he is, I'm not going to let him
badger Todd.
From what I've read, these fellows can be a little too professional. Maybe
he's okay. But I want you and this Weiskopf to remember that Todd tried to
help that old man. He was flying under false colours, but Todd didn't know
that.'
'That's okay, dad,' Todd said with a wan smile.
'I just want you to help us all that you can,' Richler said. 'I appreciate
your concern, Mr Bowden. I think you're going to find that Weiskopf is a
pleasant, low-pressure kind of guy. I've finished my own questions, but I'll
break a little ground by telling you what the Israelis are most interested in.
Todd was with Dussander when he had the heart attack that landed him in
the hospital -'
'He asked me to come over and read him a letter,' Todd said.
'We know.' Richler leaned forward, elbows on his knees, tie swinging out
to form a plumb-line to the floor. "The Israelis want to know about that
letter. Dussander was a big fish, but he wasn't the last one in the lake-or so
Sam Weiskopf says, and I believe him.
They think Dussander might have known about a lot of the other fish.
Most of those still alive are probably in South America, but there may be
others in a dozen
countries including the United States. Did you know they collared a
man who had been an Unterkommandant at Buchenwald in the lobby of a
Tel Aviv hotel?'
'Really!' Monica said, her eyes widening.
'Really,' Richler nodded. 'Two years ago. The point is just that the Israelis
think the letter Dussander wanted Todd to read might have been from one
of those other fish. Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. Either way,
they want to know.'
Todd, who had gone back to Dussander's house and burned the letter,
said: I'd help you-or this Weiskopf-if I could, Lieutenant Richler, but the
letter was in German. It was really tough to read. I felt like a fool. Mr
Denker Dussander kept getting more excited and asking me to spell the
words he couldn't understand because of my, you know, pronunciation. But
I guess he was following all right. I remember once he laughed and said,
"Yes, yes, that is what you'd do, isn't it?" Then he said something in
German.
This was about two or three minutes before he had the heart attack.
Something about Dummkop. That means stupid in German, I think.'
He was looking at Richler uncertainly, inwardly quite pleased with this
lie.
Richler was nodding. 'Yes, we can understand that the letter was in
German. The admitting doctor heard the story from you and corroborated it.
But the letter itself, Todd do you remember what happened to it?'
Here it is, Todd thought. The crunch.
'I guess it was still on the table when the ambulance came. When we all
left. I couldn't testify to it in court, but -'
'I think there was a letter on the table,' Dick said. 'I picked something up
and glanced at it Airmail stationery, I think, but I didn't notice it was written
in German.'
Then it should still be there,' Richler said. That's what we can't figure out'
'It's not?' Dick said. 'I mean, it wasn't?'
'It wasn't and it isn't'
'Maybe somebody broke in,' Monica suggested.
"There would have been no need to break in,' Richler said. 'In the
confusion of getting him out, the house was never locked. Dussander
himself never thought to ask someone to lock up, apparently. His latchkey
was still in the pocket of his pants when he died. His house was unlocked
from the time the MED-Q attendants wheeled him out until we sealed it this
morning at 2:30 a. m.'
'Well, there you are,' Dick said.
'No,' Todd said. 'I see what's bugging Lieutenant Richler.' Oh yes, he saw
it very well.
You'd have to be blind to miss it 'Why would a burglar steal nothing but a
letter?
Especially one written in German? It doesn't listen. Mr. Denker didn't
have much to steal, but a guy who broke in could find something better than
that'
'You've got it, all right,' Richler said. 'Not bad.'
'Todd used to want to be a detective when he grew up,' Monica said, and
ruffled Todd's hair a bit. Since he had gotten big he seemed to object to that,
but right now he didn't seem to mind. God, she hated to see him looking so
pale. 'I guess he's changed his mind to history these days.'
'History is a good field,' Richler said. 'You can be an investigative
historian. Have you ever read Josephine Tey?'
'No, sir.'
'Doesn't matter. I just wish my boys had some ambition greater than
seeing the Angels win the pennant this year.'
Todd offered a wan smile and said nothing.
Richler turned serious again. 'Anyway, I'll tell you the theory we're going
on. We figure that someone, probably right here in Santa Donate, knew who
and what Dussander was.'
'Really?' Dick said.
'Oh yes. Someone who knew the truth. Maybe another fugitive Nazi. I
know that sounds like Robert Ludlum stuff, but who would have thought
there was even one fugitive Nazi in a quiet little suburb like this? And when
Dussander was taken to the hospital, we think that Mr. X scooted over to
the house and got that incriminating letter. And that by now it's so many
decomposing ashes floating around in the sewer system.'
'That doesn't make much sense either,' Todd said.
'Why not, Todd?'
'Well, if Mr Denk if Dussander had an old buddy from the camps, or
just an old Nazi buddy, why did he bother to have me come over and read
him that letter? I mean, if you could have heard him correcting me, and
stuff at least this old Nazi buddy you're talking about would know how to
speak German.'
'A good point. Except maybe this other fellow is in a wheelchair, or
blind. For all we know, it might be Hermann himself and he doesn't even
dare go out and show his face.'
'Guys that are blind or in wheelchairs aren't that good at scooting out to
get letters,' Todd said.
Richler looked admiring again. 'True. But a blind man could steal a letter
even if he couldn't read it, though. Or hire it done.'
Todd thought this over, and nodded-but he shrugged at the same time to
show how farfetched he thought the idea. Richler had progressed far
beyond Robert Ludlum and into the land of Sax Rohmer. But how
farfetched the idea was or wasn't didn't matter one fucking little bit, did it?
No, what mattered was that Richler was still sniffing around and that
sheeny, Weiskopf, was also sniffing around. The letter, the goddam letter! If
only he hadn't been forced to make something up on the spur of the moment
like that!
And suddenly he was thinking of his.30-.30, cased and resting on its shelf
in the cool, dark garage. He pulled his mind away from it quickly. The
palms of his hands had gone damp.
'Did Dussander have any friends that you knew of?' Richler was asking.
'Friends? No. There used to be a cleaning lady, but she moved away and
he didn't bother to get another one. In the summer he hired a kid to mow his
lawn, but I don't think he'd gotten one this year. The grass is pretty long,
isn't it?'
'Yes. We've knocked on a lot of doors, and it doesn't seem as if he'd hired
anyone. Did he get phone-calls?'
'Sure,' Todd said off-handedly-here was a gleam of light, a possible
escape-hatch that was relatively safe. Dussander's phone had actually rung
only half a dozen tunes or so in all the time Todd had known him-salesmen,
a polling organization asking about breakfast foods, the rest wrong
numbers. He only had the phone in case he got sick as he finally had,
might his soul rot in hell. 'He used to get a call or two every week.'
'Did he speak German on those occasions?' Richler asked quickly. He
seemed
excited.
'No,' Todd said, suddenly cautious. He didn't like Richler's excitement-
there was something wrong about it, something dangerous. He felt sure of
it, and suddenly
Todd had to work furiously to keep himself from breaking a sweat. 'He
didn't talk much at all. I remember that a couple of times he said things like,
"The boy who reads to me is here right now. I'll call you back."'
'I'll bet that's it!' Richler said, whacking his palms on his thighs. 'I'd bet
two weeks' pay that was the guy!' He closed his notebook with a snap (so
far as Todd could see he had done nothing but doodle in it) and stood up. 'I
want to thank all three of you for your time. You in particular, Todd. I know
all of this has been a hell of a shock to you, but it will be over soon. We're
going to turn the house upside down this afternoon-cellar to attic and then
back down to the cellar again. We're bringing in all the special teams. We
may find some trace of Dussander's phonemate yet.'
'I hope so,' Todd said.
Richler shook hands all around and left. Dick asked Todd if he felt like
going out back and hitting the badminton birdie around until lunch. Todd
said he didn't feel much like badminton or lunch, and went upstairs with his
head down and his shoulders slumped.
His parents exchanged sympathetic, troubled glances. Todd lay down on
his bed, stared at the ceiling, and thought about his.30-.30. He could see it
very clearly in his mind's eye.
He thought about shoving the blue steel barrel right up Betty Trask's
slimy Jewish cooze -just what she needed, a prick that never went soft. How
do you like it, Betty? He heard himself asking her, You just tell me if you
get enough, okay? He imagined her screams.
And at last a terrible flat smile came to his face. Sure, just tell me, you
bitch
okay?
Okay? Okay?
'So what do you think?' Weiskopf asked Richler when Richler picked him
up at a luncheonette three blocks from the Bowden home.
'Oh, I think the kid was in on it somehow,' Richler said. 'Somehow, some
way, to some degree. But is he cool? If you poured hot water into his mouth
I think he'd spit out icecubes. I tripped him up a couple of times, but I've got
nothing I could use in court. And if I'd gone much further, some smart
lawyer might be able to get him off on entrapment a year or two down the
road even if something does pull together. I mean, he's still a juvenile.
Technically, at least in some ways, I'd guess he hasn't really been a juvenile
since he was maybe eight. He's creepy, man.' Richler stuck a cigarette in his
mouth and laughed-the laugh had a shaky sound. 'I mean, really fuckin'
creepy.'
'What slips did he make?'
'The phone calls. That's the main thing. When I slipped him the idea, I
could see his eyes light up like a pinball machine.' Richler turned left and
wheeled the nondescript Chevy Nova down the freeway entrance ramp.
Two hundred yards to their right was the slope and the dead tree where
Todd had dry-fired his rifle at the freeway traffic one Saturday morning not
long ago.
'He's saying to himself, "This cop is off the wall if he thinks Dussander
had a Nazi friend here in town, but if he does think that, it takes me off
ground-zero." So he says yeah, Dussander got one or two calls a week. Very
mysterious. "I can't talk now, Z-5, call later"-that type of thing. But
Dussander's been getting a special "quiet phone" rate for the last seven
years. Almost no activity at all, and no long distance. He wasn't getting a
call or two a week.'
'What else?'
'He immediately jumped to the conclusion that the letter had been stolen
and nothing else. He knew that was the only thing missing because he was
the one who went back and took it.'
Richler jammed his cigarette out in the ashtray.
'We think the letter was just a prop. We think that Dussander had the
heart attack while he was trying to bury that body the freshest body. There
was dirt on his shoes and his cuffs, and it was fresh, so that's a pretty fair
assumption. That means he called the kid after he had the heart attack, not
before. He crawls upstairs and phones the kid. The kid flips out-as much as
he ever flips out, anyway -and cooks up the letter story on the spur of the
moment. It's not great, but not that bad, either considering the
circumstances. He goes over there and cleans up Dussander's mess for him.
Now the kid is in fucking overdrive. MED-Q's coming, his father is
coming, and he needs that letter for stage-dressing. He goes upstairs and
breaks open that box -'
'You've got confirmation on that?' Weiskopf asked, lighting a cigarette of
his own. It was an unfiltered Player, and to Richler it smelted like horseshit
No wonder the British Empire fell, he thought, if they started smoking
cigarettes like that. 'Yes, we've got confirmation right up the ying-yang,'
Richler said. 'There are fingerprints on the box which match those in his
school records. But his fingerprints are on almost everything in the goddam
house!'
'Still, if you confront him with all of that, you can rattle him,' Weiskopf
said. 'Oh, listen, hey, you don't know this kid. When I said he was cool, I
meant it. He'd say Dussander asked him to fetch the box once or twice so he
could put something in it or take something out of it'
'His fingerprints are on the shovel.'
'He'd say he used it to plant a rose-bush in the back yard.' Richler took
out his cigarettes but the pack was empty. Weiskopf offered him a Player.
Richler took one puff and began coughing. 'They taste as bad as they smell,'
he choked.
'Like those hamburgers we had for lunch yesterday,' Weiskopf said,
smiling. 'Those Mac-Burgers.'
'Big Macs,' Richler said, and laughed. 'Okay. So cross-cultural pollination
doesn't always work.' His smile faded. 'He looks so clean-cut, you know?
'Yes.'
'This is no jd from Vasco with hair down to his asshole and chains on his
motorcycle boots.'
'No.' Weiskopf stared at the traffic all around them and was very glad he
wasn't driving.
'He's just a boy. A white boy from a good home. And I find it difficult to
believe that -'
'I thought you had them ready to handle rifles and grenades by the time
they were eighteen. In Israel.'
'Yes. But he was fourteen when all of this started. Why should a fourteen-
year-old-boy mix himself up with such a man as Dussander? I have tried
and tried to understand that and still I can't.'
'I'd settle for how,' Richler said, and flicked the cigarette out the window.
It was giving him a headache.
'Perhaps, if it did happen, it was just luck. A coincidence. There is a word
I like very much, Lieutenant Richler -serendipity. I think there is black
serendipity as well as white.'
'I don't know what you're talking about,' Richler said gloomily. 'All I
know is the kid is creepier than a bug under a rock.'
'What I'm saying is simple. Any other boy would have been more than
happy to tell his parents, or the police. To say, "I have recognized a wanted
man. He is living at this address. Yes, I am sure." And then let the
authorities take over. Or do you feel I am wrong?'
'No, I wouldn't say so. The kid would be in the limelight for a few days.
Most kids would dig that. Picture in the paper, an interview on the evening
news, probably a school assembly award for good citizenship.' Richler
laughed. 'Hell, the kid would probably get a shot on Real People.'
'What's that?'
'Never mind,' Richler said. He had to raise his voice slightly because a
ten-wheeler was passing the Nova on either side. Weiskopf looked
nervously from one to the other. 'You don't want to know. But you're right
about most kids. Most kids.'
'But not this kid,' Weiskopf said. 'This boy, probably by dumb luck alone,
penetrates Dussander's cover. Yet instead of going to his parents or the
authorities he goes to Dussander. Why? You say you don't care, but I think
you do. I think it haunts you just as it does me.'
'Not blackmail,' Richler said. 'That's for sure. That kid's got everything a
kid could want There was even a dune-buggy in the garage, not to mention
an elephant gun on the wall.
And even if he wanted to squeeze Dussander just for the thrill of it,
Dussander was practically unsqueezable. Except for those few stocks, he
didn't have a pot to piss in.'
'How sure are you that the boy doesn't know you've found the bodies?'
'I'm sure. Maybe I'll go back this afternoon and hit him with that. Right
now it looks like our best shot.' Richler struck the steering wheel lightly. 'If
all of this had come out even one day sooner, I think I would have tried for
a search warrant.'
'The clothes the boy was wearing that night?'
'Yeah. If we could have found soil samples on his clothes that matched
the dirt in Dussander's cellar, I almost think we could break him. But the
clothes he was wearing that night have probably been washed six times
since them.'
'What about the other dead winos? The ones your police department has
been finding around the city?'
"Those belong to Dan Bozeman. I don't think there's any connection
anyhow. Dussander just wasn't that strong and more to the point, he had
such a neat little racket already worked out. Promise them a drink and a
meal, take them home on the city bus-the fucking city bus!-and waste them
right in his kitchen.' Weiskopf said quietly: 'It wasn't Dussander I was
thinking of.'
'What do you mean by th -' Richler began, and then his mouth snapped
suddenly closed. There was a long, unbelieving moment of silence, broken
only by the drone of the traffic all around them. Then Richler said softly:
'Hey. Hey, come on now. Give me a fucking br -'
'As an agent of my government, I am only interested in Bowden because
of what, if anything, he may know about Dussander's remaining contacts
with the Nazi underground. But as a human being, I am becoming more and
more interested in the boy himself. I'd like to know what makes him tick. I
want to know why. And as I try to answer that question to my own
satisfaction, I find that more and more I am asking myself What else.'
'But-'
'Do you suppose, I ask myself, that the very atrocities in which
Dussander took part formed the basis of some attraction between them?
That's an unholy idea, I
tell myself. The things that happened in those camps still have power
enough to make the stomach flutter with nausea. I feel that way myself,
although the only close relative I ever had in the camps was my grandfather,
and he died when I was three. But maybe for all of us there is something
about what the Germans did that pleases and excites us-something that
opens the catacombs of the imagination. Maybe part of our dread and horror
comes from a secret knowledge that under the right-or wrong-set of
circumstances, we ourselves would be willing to build such places and staff
them. Black serendipity. Maybe we know that under the right set of
circumstances the things that live in the catacombs would be glad to crawl
out And what do you think they would look like? Like mad fuehrers with
forelocks and shoe-polish moustaches, heiling all over the place? Like red
devils, or demons, or the dragon that floats on its stinking reptile wings?'
'I don't know,' Richler said.
'I think most of them would look like ordinary accountants,' Weiskopf
said. 'Little mind-men with graphs and flow-charts and electronic
calculators, all ready to start maximizing the kill ratios so that next time we
could perhaps kill twenty or thirty millions instead of only seven or eight or
twelve. And some of them might look like Todd Bowden.'
'You're damn near as creepy as he is,' Richler said.
Weiskopf nodded. 'It's a creepy subject Finding those dead men and
animals in Dussander's cellar that was creepy, no? Have you ever thought
that maybe this boy began with a simple interest in the camps? An interest
not much different from the interests of boys who collect coins or stamps or
who like to read about wild West desperados? And that he went to
Dussander to get his information straight from the horse's head?'
'Mouth,' Weiskopf muttered. It was almost lost in the roar of another ten-
wheeler passing them. BUDWEISER was printed on the side in letters six
feet tall. What an amazing country, Weiskopf thought and lit a fresh
cigarette. They don't understand how we can live surrounded by half-mad
Arabs, but if I lived here for two years I would have a nervous breakdown.
'Maybe. And maybe it isn't possible to stand close to murder piled on
murder and not be touched by it.'
29
The short guy who entered the squadroom brought stench after him like a
wake. He smelted like rotten bananas and Wildroot Cream Oil and
cockroach shit and the inside of a city garbage truck at the end of a busy
morning. He was dressed in a pair of ageing herringbone pants, a ripped
grey institutional shirt, and a faded blue warmup jacket from which most of
the zipper hung loose like a string of pygmy teeth. The uppers of his shoes
were bound to the lowers with Krazy Glue. A pestiferous hat sat on his
head. He looked like death with a hangover.
'Oh Christ, get out of here!' The duty sergeant cried. 'You're not under
arrest, Hap! I swear to God! I swear it on my mother's name! Get out of
here! I want to breathe again.'
'I want to talk to Lieutenant Bozeman.'
'He died, Hap. It happened yesterday. We're all really fucked up over it.
So get out and let us mourn in peace.'
'I want to talk to Lieutenant Bozeman!' Hap said more loudly. His breath
drifted fragrantly from his mouth: a juicy, fermenting mixture of pizza,
Hall's Mentholyptus lozenges, and sweet red wine.
'He had to go to Siam on a case, Hap. So why don't you just get out of
here? Go someplace and eat a lightbulb.'
'I want to talk to Lieutenant Bozeman and I ain't leaving until I do!'
The duty sergeant fled the room. He returned about five minutes later
with Bozeman, a thin, slightly stooped man of fifty.
'Take him into your office, okay, Dan?' The duty sergeant begged. 'Won't
that be all right?'
'Come on, Hap,' Bozeman said, and a minute later they were in the three-
sided stall that was Bozeman's office. Bozeman prudently opened his only
window and turned on his fan before sitting down. 'Do something for you,
Hap?'
'You still on those murders, Lieutenant Bozeman?'
'The derelicts? Yeah, I guess that's still mine.'
'Well, I know who greased 'em.'
'Is that so, Hap?' Bozeman asked. He was busy lighting his pipe. He
rarely smoked the pipe, but neither the fan nor the open window was quite
enough to overwhelm Hap's smell. Soon, Bozeman thought, the paint would
begin to blister and peel. He sighed.
'You member I tole you Sonny was talking to a guy just a day before they
found him all cut up in that pipe? You member me tellin' you that,
Lieutenant Bozeman?'
'I remember.' Several of the winos who hung around the Salvation Army
and the soup kitchen a few blocks away had told a similar story about two
of the murdered derelicts, Charles 'Sonny' Brackett and Peter 'Poley' Smith.
They had seen a guy hanging around, a young guy, talking to Sonny and
Poley. Nobody knew for sure if Sonny had gone off with the guy, but Hap
and two others claimed to have seen Poley Smith walk off with him. They
had the idea that the 'guy' was underage and willing to spring for a bottle of
musky in exchange for some juice. Several other winos claimed to have
seen a 'guy' like that around. The description of this 'guy' was superb, bound
to stand up in court, coming as it did from such unimpeachable sources.
Young, blond, and white. What else did you need to make a bust?
'Well, last night I was in the park,' Hap said, 'and I just happened to have
this old bunch of newspapers -'
'There's a law against vagrancy in this city, Hap.'
'I was just collectin 'em up,' Hap said righteously. 'It's so awful the way
people litter. I was doin' a public surface, Lieutenant A friggin' public
surface. Some of those papers was a week old.'
'Yes. Hap.' Bozeman said. He remembered-vaguely being quite hungry
and looking forward keenly to his lunch. That time seemed long ago now.
'Well, when I woke up, one of those papers had blew onto my face and I
was looking right at the guy. Gave me a hell of a jump, I can tell you. Look.
This is the guy. This guy right here.'
Hap pulled a crumpled, yellowed, water-spotted sheet of newspaper from
his warmup jacket and unfolded it Bozeman leaned forward, now
moderately interested. Hap put the paper on his desk so he could read the
headline: 4 BOYS NAMED TO SOUTHERN CAL ALL-STARS. Below
the head were four photos.
'Which one, Hap?'
Hap put a grimy finger on the picture to the far right 'Him. It says his
name is Todd Bowden.'
Bozeman looked from the picture to Hap, wondering how many of Hap's
brain-cells were still unfried and in some kind of working order after twenty
years of being sauteed in a bubbling sauce of cheap wine seasoned with an
occasional shot of sterno.
'How can you be sure, Hap? He's wearing a baseball cap in the picture. I
can't tell if he's got blond hair or not'
'The grin,' Hap said. 'It's the way he's grinnin'. He was grinnin' at Poley in
just that same ain't-life-grand way when they walked off together. I couldn't
mistake that grin in a million years. That's him, that's the guy.'
Bozeman barely heard this last; he was thinking, and thinking hard. Todd
Bowden. There was something familiar about that name. Something that
bothered him even worse than the thought that a local high school hero
might be going around and offing winos. He thought he had heard that
name just this morning in conversation. He frowned, trying to remember
where.
Hap was gone and Dan Bozeman was still trying to figure it out when
Richler and Weiskopf came in and it was the sound of their voices as they
got coffee in the squadroom that finally brought it home to him.
'Holy God,' said Lieutenant Bozeman, and got up in a hurry.
30
Both of his parents had offered to cancel their afternoon plans-Monica at
the market and Dick golfing with some business people-and stay home with
him, but Todd told them he would rather be alone. He thought he would
clean his rifle and just sort of think the whole thing over. Try to get it
straight in his mind.
'Todd,' Dick said, and suddenly found he had nothing much to say. He
supposed if he had been his own father, he would have at this point advised
prayer. But the generations had turned, and the Bowdens weren't much into
that these days. 'Sometimes these things happen,' he finished lamely,
because Todd was still looking at him. 'Try not to brood about it.'
'I'll be all right.' Todd said.
After they were gone, he took some rags and a bottle of Alpaca gun oil
out onto the bench beside the roses. He went back into the garage and got
the.30-30. He took it to the bench and broke it down, the dusty-sweet smell
of the flowers lingering pleasantly in his nose. He cleaned the gun
thoroughly, humming a tune as he did it, sometimes whistling a snatch
between his teeth. Then he put the gun together again. He could have done
it just as easily in the dark. His mind wandered free. When it came back
some five minutes later, he observed that he had loaded the gun. The idea of
target shooting didn't much appeal, not today, but he had still loaded it. He
told himself he didn't know why.
Sure you do, Todd-baby. The time, so to speak, has come.
And that was when the shiny yellow Saab turned into the driveway. The
man who got out was vaguely familiar to Todd, but it wasn't until he
slammed the car door and started to walk towards him that Todd saw the
sneakers-low-topped Keds, light blue. Talk about Blasts from the Past; here,
walking up the Bowden driveway, was Rubber Ed French, the Ked Man.
'Hi, Todd. Long time no see.'
Todd leaned the rifle against the side of the bench and offered his wide
and winsome grin. 'Hi, Mr. French. What are you doing out here on the wild
side of town?'
'Are your folks home?'
'Gee, no. Did you want them for something?'
'No,' Ed French said after a long, thoughtful pause. 'No, I guess not I
guess maybe it would be better if just you and I talked. For starters, anyway.
You may be able to offer a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this.
Although God knows I doubt it.'
He reached into his hip pocket and brought out a newsclipping. Todd
knew what it was even before Rubber Ed passed it to him, and for the
second time that day he was looking at the side-by-side pictures of
Dussander. The one the street-photographer had taken had been circled in
black ink. The meaning was clear enough to Todd; French had recognized
Todd's 'grandfather'. And now he wanted to tell everyone in the world all
about it. He wanted to midwife the good news. Good old Rubber Ed, with
his jive talk and his motherfucking sneakers.
The police would be very interested-but, of course, they already were. He
knew that now. The sinking feeling had begun about thirty minutes after
Richler left. It was as if he had been riding high in a balloon filled with
happy-gas. Then a cold steel arrow had ripped through the balloon's fabric,
and now it was sinking steadily.
The phone calls, that was the biggie. Fucking Richler had trotted that out
just as slick as warm owlshit. Sure, he had said, practically breaking his
neck to rush into the trap. He gets one or two calls a week. Let them go
ranting all over southern California looking for geriatric ex-Nazis. Fine.
Except maybe they had gotten a different story from Ma Bell.
Todd didn't know if the phone company could tell how much you used
your phone for local calls but there had been a look in Richler's eyes
Then there was the letter. He had inadvertently told Richler that the house
hadn't been burgled, and Richler had no doubt gone away thinking that the
only way Todd could have known that was if he had been back as he had
been, not just once but three times, first to get the letter and twice more
looking for anything incriminating. There had been nothing; even the
Gestapo uniform was gone, disposed of by Dussander sometime during the
last four years.
And then there were the bodies. Richler had never mentioned the bodies.
At first Todd had thought that was good. Let them hunt a little longer
while he got his own head-not to mention his story-straight. No fear about
the dirt that had gotten on his clothes burying the body; they had all been
cleaned later that same night. He ran them through the washer-dryer
himself, perfectly aware that Dussander might die and then everything
might come out. You can't be too careful, boy, as Dussander himself would
have said.
Then, little by little, he had realized it was not good. The weather had
been warm, and the warm weather always made the cellar smell worse; on
his last trip to Dussander's house it had been a rank presence. Surely the
police would have been interested in that smell, and would have tracked it
to its source. So why had Richler withheld the information? Was he saving
it for later? Saving it for a nasty little surprise? And if Richler was into
planning nasty little surprises, it could mean that he
suspected.
Todd looked up from the clipping and saw that Rubber Ed had half
turned away from him. He was looking into the street, although not much
was happening out there. Richler could suspect, but suspicion was the best
he could do.
Unless there was some sort of concrete evidence binding Todd to the old
man.
Exactly the sort of evidence Rubber Ed French could give.
Ridiculous man in a pair of ridiculous sneakers. Such a ridiculous man
hardly deserved to live. Todd touched the barrel of the.30-.30.
Yes, Rubber Ed was the link they didn't have. They could never prove
that Todd had been an accessory to one of Dussander's murders. But with
Rubber Ed's testimony they could prove conspiracy. And would even that
end it? Oh, no. They would get his high school graduation picture next and
start showing it to the stewbums down in the Mission district. A long shot,
but one Richler could ill afford not to play. If we can't pin one bunch of
winos on him, maybe we can get him for the other bunch.
What next? Court next.
His father would get him a wonderful bunch of lawyers, of course. And
the lawyers would get him off, of course. Too much circumstantial
evidence. He would make too favourable an impression on the jury. But by
then his life would be ruined anyway. It would all be dragged through the
newspapers, dug up and brought into the light like the half-decayed bodies
in Dussander's cellar.
The man in that picture is the man who came to my office when you were
in the ninth grade,' Ed told him abruptly, turning to Todd again. 'He
purported to be your grandfather. Now it turns out he was a wanted war
criminal.'
'Yes,' Todd said. His face had gone oddly blank. It was the face of a
department store dummy. All the healthiness, life, and vivacity had drained
from it What was left was frightening in its vacuous emptiness.
'How did it happen?' Ed asked, and perhaps he intended his question as a
thundering accusation, but it came out sounding plaintive and lost and
somehow cheated. 'How did this happen, Todd?'
'Oh, one thing just followed another,' Todd said, and picked up
the.30-.30. 'That's really how it happened. One thing just followed
another.' He pushed the safety catch to the off position with his thumb and
pointed the rifle at Rubber Ed. 'As stupid as it sounds, that's just what
happened. That's all there was to it.'
'Todd,' Ed said, his eyes widening. He took a step backward. Todd, you
don't want to please, Todd. We can talk this over. We can disc -'
'You and the fucking kraut can discuss it down in hell,' Todd said, and
pulled the trigger. The sound of the shot rolled away in the hot and windless
quiet of the afternoon. Ed French was flung back against his Saab. His hand
groped behind him and tore off a windshield wiper. He stared at it foolishly
as blood spread on his blue turtleneck, and then he dropped it and looked at
Todd. 'Norma,' he whispered.
'Okay,' Todd said. 'Whatever you say, champ.' He shot Rubber Ed again
and roughly half of his head disappeared in a spray of blood and bone.
Ed turned drunkenly and began to grope towards the driver's side door,
speaking his daughter's name over and over again in a choked and failing
voice. Todd shot him again, aiming for the base of the spine, and Ed fell
down. His feet drummed briefly on the gravel and then were still.
Sure did die hard for a guidance counsellor, Todd thought, and brief
laughter escaped him. At the same moment a burst of pain as sharp as an
icepick drove into his brain and he closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, he felt better than he had in months-maybe
better than he had felt in years. Everything was fine. Everything was
together. The blankness left his face and a kind of wild beauty filled it.
He went back into the garage and got all the shells he had, better than
four hundred rounds. He put them in his old knapsack and shouldered it
When he came back out into the sunshine he was smiling excitedly, his eyes
dancing-it was the way boys smile on their birthdays, on Christmas, on the
Fourth of July. It was a smile that betokened skyrockets, treehouses, secret
signs and secret meeting-places, the aftermath of the triumphal big game
when the players are carried into town on the shoulders of the exultant fans.
The ecstatic smile of tow-headed boys going off to war in coalscuttle
helmets.
'I'm king of the world!' he shouted mightily at the high blue sky, and
raised the rifle two-handed over his head for a moment. Then, switching it
to his right hand, he started towards that place above the freeway where the
land fell away and where the dead tree would give him shelter.
It was five hours later and almost dark before they took him down.
The End
THE BODY
1
The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the
things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them-words shrink
things that seemed limitless when they were In your head to no more than
living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The
most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried,
like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And
you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at
you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you
thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it.
That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want
of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.
I was twelve going on thirteen when I first saw a dead human being. It
happened in 1960, a long time ago although sometimes it doesn't seem
that long to me. Especially on the nights I wake up from those dreams
where the hail fell into his open eyes.
2
We had a treehouse in a big elm which overhung a vacant lot in Castle
Rock. There's a moving company on that lot today, and the elm is gone.
Progress. It was a sort of social club, although it had no name. There were
five, maybe six steady guys and some other wet ends who just hung around.
We'd let them come up when there was a card game and we needed some
fresh blood. The game was usually blackjack and we played for pennies,
nickel limit. But you got double money on blackjack and five-card-under
triple money on six-card-under, although Teddy was the only guy crazy
enough to go for that.
The sides of the treehouse were planks scavenged from the shitpile
behind Makey Lumber & Building Supply on Carbine Road-they were
splintery and full of knotholes we plugged with either toilet paper or paper
towels. The roof was a corrugated tin sheet we hawked from the dump,
looking over our shoulders all the time we were hustling it out of there,
because the dump custodian's dog was supposed to be a real kid-eating
monster. We found a screen door out there on the same day. It was flyproof
but really rusty -I mean, that rust was extreme. No matter what time of day
you looked out that screen door, it looked like sunset Besides playing cards,
the club was a good place to go and smoke cigarettes and look at girly
books. There were half a dozen battered tin ashtrays that said CAMELS on
the bottom, a lot of centerfolds tacked to the splintery walls, twenty or thirty
dog-eared packs of Bike cards (Teddy got them from his uncle, who ran the
Castle Rock Stationery Shoppe-when Teddy's unc asked him one day what
kind of cards we played, Teddy said we had cribbage tournaments and
Teddy's unc thought that was just fine), a set of plastic poker chips, and a
pile of ancient Master Detective murder magazines to leaf through if there
was nothing else shaking. We also built a 12" x 10" secret compartment
under the floor to hide most of this stuff in on the rare occasions when some
kid's father decided it was time to do the We're Really Good Pals routine.
When it rained, being in the club was like being inside a Jamaican steel
drum but that summer there had been no rain.
It had been the driest and hottest since 1907-or so the newspapers said,
and on that Friday preceding the Labour Day weekend and the start of
another school year, even the goldenrod in the fields and the ditches beside
the backroads looked parched and poorly.
Nobody's garden had done doodly-squat that year, and the big displays of
canning stuff in the Castle Rock Red & White were still there, gathering
dust. No one had anything to put up that summer, except maybe dandelion
wine.
Teddy and Chris and I were up in the club on that Friday morning,
glooming to each other about school being so near and playing cards and
swapping the same old travelling salesman jokes and Frenchman jokes.
How do you know when a Frenchman's been in your back yard? Well, your
garbage cans are empty and your dog is pregnant. Teddy would try to look
offended, but he was the first one to bring in a joke as soon as he heard it,
only switching Frenchman to Polack.
The elm gave good shade, but we already had our shirts off so we
wouldn't sweat them up too bad. We were playing three-penny-scat, the
dullest card game ever invented, but it was too hot to think about anything
more complicated. We'd had a pretty fair scratch ballteam until the middle
of August and then a lot of kids just drifted away. Too hot I was down to my
ride and building spades. I'd started with thirteen, gotten an eight to make
twenty-one, and nothing had happened since then. Chris knocked. I took my
last draw and got nothing helpful.
'Twenty-nine,' Chris said, laying down diamonds.
'Twenty-two,' Teddy said, looking disgusted.
'Piss up a rope,' I said, and tossed my cards onto the table face-down.
'Gordie's out, ole Gordie just bit the bag and stepped out the door,' Teddy
bugled, and then gave out with his patented Teddy Duchamp laugh-Eeee-
eee-eee, like a rusty nail being slowly hauled out of a rotten board. Well, he
was weird; we all knew it. Close to being thirteen like the rest of us, the
thick glasses and the hearing aid he wore sometimes made him look like an
old man. Kids were always trying to cadge smokes off him on the street, but
the bulge in his shirt was just his hearing aid battery.
In spite of the glasses and the flesh-coloured button always screwed into
his ear, Teddy couldn't see very well and often misunderstood the things
people said to him. In baseball you had to have him play the fences, way
beyond Chris in left field and Billy Greer in right. You just hoped no one
would hit one that far because Teddy would go grimly after it, see it or not.
Every now and then he got bonked a good one, and once he went out cold
when he ran full tilt boogie into the fence by the treehouse. He lay there on
his back with his eyes showing whites for almost five minutes, and I got
scared. Then he woke up and walked around with a bloody nose and a huge
purple lump rising on his forehead, trying to claim that the ball was foul.
His eyesight was just naturally bad, but there was nothing natural about
what had happened to his ears. Back in those days, when it was cool to get
your hair cut so that your ears stuck out like a couple of jug-handles, Teddy
had Castle Rock's first Beatle haircut-four years before anyone in America
had even heard of the Beatles. He kept his ears covered because they looked
like two lumps of warm wax.
One day when he was eight, Teddy's father got pissed at him for breaking
a plate. His mother was working at the shoe factory in South Paris when it
happened and by the time she found out about it, everything had happened.
Teddy's dad took Teddy over to the big woodstove at the back of the
kitchen and shoved the side of Teddy's head down against one of the cast-
iron burner plates. He held it down there for about ten seconds. Then he
yanked Teddy up by the hair and did the other side. Then he called the
Central Maine General Emergency Unit and told them to come get his boy.
Then he hung up the phone, went into the closet, got his four-ten, and sat
down to watch the daytime stories on TV with the shotgun laid across his
knees. When Mrs Burroughs from next door came over to ask if Teddy was
all right-she'd heard the screaming-Teddy's dad pointed the shotgun at her.
Mrs Burroughs went out of the Duchamp house at roughly the speed of
light, locked herself into her own house, and called the police. When the
ambulance came, Mr. Duchamp let the orderlies in and then went out on the
back porch to stand guard while they wheeled Teddy to the old portholed
Buick ambulance on a stretcher.
Teddy's dad explained to the orderlies that while the fucking brass hats
said the area was clear, there were still Kraut snipers everywhere. One of
the orderlies asked Teddy's Dad if he thought he could hold on. Teddy's dad
smiled. Frigidaire dealership, if that's what it took. The orderly saluted, and
Teddy's dad snapped it right back at him. A few minutes after the
ambulance left, the state police arrived and relieved Norman Duchamp of
duty. He'd been doing odd things like shooting cats and lighting fires in
mailboxes for over a year, and after the atrocity he had visited upon his son,
they had a quick hearing and sent him to Togus, which is a special sort of V.
A. hospital. Togus is where you have to go if you're a section eight. Teddy's
dad had stormed the beach at Normandy, and that's just the way Teddy
always put it. Teddy was proud of his old man in spite of what his old man
had done to him, and Teddy went with his mom to visit him every week. He
was the dumbest guy we hung around with, I guess, and he was crazy. He'd
take the craziest chances you can imagine, and get away with them. His big
thing was what he called Truck Dodging. He'd run out in front of them on
196 and sometimes they'd miss him by bare inches. God knew how many
heart attacks he'd caused, and he'd be laughing while the windblast from the
passing truck rippled his clothes. It scared us because his vision was so
lousy. Coke-bottle glasses or not. It seemed like only a matter of time
before he misjudged one of those trucks. And you had to be careful what
you dared him, because Teddy would do anything on a dare. 'Gordie's out,
eeeeee-eee-eee!'
'Screw,' I said, and picked up a Master Detective to read while they
played it out. I turned to 'He Stomped the Pretty Co-Ed to Death in a Stalled
Elevator' and got right into it. Teddy picked up the cards, gave them one
brief look, and said: 'I knock.'
'You four-eyed pile of shit!' Chris cried.
'The pile of shit has a thousand eyes,' Teddy said seriously, and both
Chris and I cracked up. Teddy stared at us with a slight frown, as if
wondering what had gotten us laughing. That was another thing about the
cat-he was always coming out with weird stuff like "The pile of shit has a
thousand eyes', and you could never be sure if he meant it to he funny or if
it just happened that way. He'd look at the people who were laughing with
that slight frown on his face, as if to say O Lord what is it this time? Teddy
had a natural thirty-jack, queen, and king of clubs. Chris had only sixteen
and went down to his ride.
Teddy was shuffling the cards in his clumsy way and I was just getting to
the gooshy part of the murder story, where this deranged sailor from New
Orleans was doing the Bristol Stomp all over this college girl from Bryn
Mawr because he couldn't
stand being in closed-in spaces, when we heard someone coming fast up
the ladder nailed to the side of the elm. A fist rapped on the underside of the
trapdoor.
'Who goes?' Chris yelled.
'Vern!' He sounded excited and out of breath.
I went to the trapdoor and pulled the bolt. The trapdoor banged up and
Vern Tessio, one of the other regulars, pulled himself into the clubhouse. He
was sweating buckets and his hair, which he usually kept combed in a
perfect imitation of his rock and roll idol, Bobby Rydell, was plastered to
his bullet head in chunks and strings.
'Wow, man,' he panted. 'Wait'll you hear this.'
'Hear what?' I asked.
'Lemme get my breath. I ran all the way from my house.'
'I ran all the way home,' Teddy wavered in a dreadful Little Anthony
falsetto, 'just to say I'm soh-ree-
'Tuck your hand, man,' Vern said.
'Drop dead in a shed, Fred,' Teddy returned smartly.
'You ran all the way from your place?' Chris asked unbelievingly. 'Man,
you're
crazy.'
Vern's house was two miles down Grand Street. 'It must be ninety out
there.'
'This is worth it,' Vern said. 'Holy Jeezum. You won't believe this.
Sincerely.' He slapped his sweaty forehead to show us how sincere he was.
'Okay, what?' Chris asked.
'Can you guys camp out tonight?' Vern was looking at us earnestly,
excitedly. His eyes looked like raisins pushed into dark circles of sweat 'I
mean, if you tell your folks we're gonna tent out in my back field?'
'Yeah, I guess so,' Chris said, picking up his new hand and y'know.'
'You got to, man,' Vern said. 'Sincerely. You won't believe this. Can you,
Gordie?'
'Probably.'
I was able to do most stuff like that-in fact, I'd been like the Invisible Boy
that whole summer. In April my older brother, Dennis, had been killed in a
Jeep accident. That was at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he was in basic.
He and another guy were on their way to the PX and an army truck hit them
broadside. Dennis was killed instantly and his passenger had been in a coma
ever since. Dennis would have been twenty later that week.
I'd already picked out a birthday card for him at Dahlie's over in Castle
Green.
I cried when I heard, and I cried more at the funeral, and I couldn't
believe that Dennis was gone, that anyone that used to knuckle my head or
scare me with a rubber spider until I cried or give me a kiss when I fell
down and scraped both knees bloody and whisper in my ear, 'Now stop
cryin', ya baby!'-that a person who had touched me could be dead. It hurt
me and it scared me that he could be dead but it seemed to have taken all
the heart out of my parents. For me, Dennis was hardly more than an
acquaintance. He was eight years older than me if you can dig it, and he had
his own friends and classmates. We ate at the same table for a lot of years,
and sometimes he was my friend and sometimes my tormentor, but mostly
he was, you know, just a guy. When he died he'd been gone for a year
except for a couple of furloughs. We didn't even look alike. It took me a
long time after that summer to realize that most of the tears I cried were for
my mom and dad. Fat lot of good it did them, or me.
'So what are you pissing and moaning about, Vern-O?' Teddy asked.
'I knock,' Chris said.
'What?' Teddy screamed, immediately forgetting all about Vern. 'You
friggin' liar! You ain't got to pat hand. I didn't deal you no pat hand.' Chris
smirked. 'Make your draw, shitheap.'
Teddy reached for the top card of the pile of Bikes. Chris reached for the
Winstons on the ledge behind him. I bent over to pick up my detective
magazine. Vern Tessio said: 'You guys want to go see a dead body?'
Everybody stopped.
3
We'd all heard about it on the radio, of course. The radio, a Philco with a
cracked case which had also been scavenged from the dump, played all the
time. We kept it tuned to WLAM in Lewiston, which churned out the super-
hits and the boss oldies: 'What in the World's Come Over You' by Jack Scott
and 'This Time' by Troy Shondell and 'King Creole' by Elvis and 'Only the
Lonely' by Roy Orbison. When the news came on we usually switched
some mental dial over to Mute. The news was a lot of happy horseshit about
Kennedy and Nixon and Quemoy and Matsu and the missile gap and what a
shit that Castro was turning out to be after all. But we had all listened to the
Ray Brower story a little more closely, because he was a kid our age.
He was from Chamberlain, a town forty miles or so east of Castle Rock.
Three days before Vern came busting into the clubhouse after a two-mile
run up Grand Street, Ray Brower had gone out with one of his mother's pots
to pick blueberries. When dark came and he still wasn't back, the Browers
called the county sheriff and a search started-first just around the kid's
house and then spreading to the surrounding towns of Motton and Durham
and Pownal. Everybody got into the act-cops, deputies, game wardens,
volunteers. But three days later the kid was still missing. You could tell,
hearing about it on the radio, that they were never going to find that poor
sucker alive; eventually the search would just peter away into nothing. He
might have gotten smothered in a gravel pit slide or drowned in a brook,
and ten years from now some hunter would find his bones. They were
already dragging the ponds in Chamberlain, and the Motton Reservoir.
Nothing like that could happen in south-western Maine today; most of the
area has become suburbanized, and the bedroom communities surrounding
Portland and Lewiston have spread out like the tentacles of a giant squid.
The woods are still there, and they get heavier as you work your way west
towards the White Mountains, but these days if you can keep your head
long enough to walk five miles in one consistent direction, you're certain to
cross two-lane blacktop. But in 1960 the whole area between Chamberlain
and Castle Rock was undeveloped, and there were places that hadn't even
been logged since before World War II. In those days it was still possible to
walk into the woods and lose your direction there and die there.
Vern Tessio had been under his porch that morning, digging.
We all understood that right away, but maybe I should take just a minute
to explain it to you. Teddy Duchamp was only about half-bright, but Vern
Tessio would never be spending any of his spare time on Quiz Kids either.
Still, his brother Billy was even dumber, as you will see. But first I have to
tell you why Vern was digging under the porch.
Four years ago, when he was eight, Vern buried a quart jar of pennies
under the long Tessio front porch. Vern called the dark space under the
porch his 'cave'. He was playing a pirate sort of game, and the pennies were
buried treasure -only if you were playing pirate with Vern, you couldn't call
it buried treasure, you had to call it 'booty'. So he buried the jar of pennies
deep, filled in the hole, and covered the fresh dirt with some of the old
leaves that had drifted under there over the years. He drew a treasure map
which he put up in his room with the rest of his junk. He forgot all about it
for a month or so. Then, being low on cash for a movie or something, he
remembered the pennies and went to get his map. But his mom had been in
to clean two or three times since then, and had collected all the old
homework papers and candy wrappers and comic magazines and joke
books. She burned them in the stove to start the cook-fire one morning, and
Vern's treasure map went right up the kitchen chimney. Or so he figured it.
He tried to find the spot from memory and dug there. No luck. To the
right and the left of that spot. Still no luck. He gave up for the day but had
tried off and on ever since. Four years, man. Four years. Isn't that a pisser?
You didn't know whether to laugh or cry. It had gotten to be sort of an
obsession with him. The Tessio front porch ran the length of the house,
probably forty feet long and seven feet wide. He had dug through damn
near every inch of that area two, maybe three times and no pennies. The
number of pennies began to grow in his mind. When it first happened he
told Chris and me that there had been maybe three dollars' worth. A year
later he was up to five and just lately it was running around ten, more or
less, depending on how broke he was. Every so often we tried to tell him
what was so clear to us-that Billy had known about the jar and dug it up
himself. Vern refused to believe it, although he hated Billy like the Arabs
hate the Jews and probably would have cheerfully voted the death penalty
on his brother for shoplifting, if the opportunity had ever presented itself.
He also refused to ask Billy point blank. Probably he was afraid Billy
would laugh and say, Course I got them, you stupid pussy, and there was
twenty bucks' worth of pennies in that jar and I spent every fuckin' cent of
it. Instead, Vern went out and dug for the pennies whenever the spirit
moved him (and whenever Billy wasn't around). He always crawled out
from under the porch with his jeans dirty and his hair leafy and his hands
empty. We ragged him about it something wicked, and his nickname was
Penny-Penny Tessio. I think he came up to the club with his news as quick
as he did not just to get it out but to show us that some good had finally
come of his penny-hunt He had been up that morning before anybody, ate
his cornflakes, and was out in the driveway shooting baskets through the
old hoop nailed up on the garage, nothing much to do. No one to play Ghost
with or anything, and he decided to have another dig for his pennies. He
was under the porch when the screen door slammed up above. He froze, not
making a sound. If it was his dad, he would crawl out; if it was Billy, he'd
stay put until Billy and hisfriend Charlie Hogan had taken off.
Two pairs of footsteps crossed the porch, and then Charlie Hogan himself
said in a trembling, cry-baby voice: 'Jesus Christ, Billy, what are we gonna
do?' Vern said that just hearing Charlie Hogan talk like that -Charlie, who
was one of the toughest
kids in town-made him prick up his ears. Charlie, after all, hung out with
Ace Merrill and Eyeball Chambers, and if you hung out with cats like that,
you had to be tough.
'Nuthin',' Billy said. "That's all we're gonna do. Nuthin'.'
'We gotta do somethin' Charlie said, and they sat down on the porch close
to where Vern was hunkered down. 'Didn't you see him?'
Vern took a chance and crept a little closer to the steps, practically
slavering. At that point he thought that maybe Billy and Charlie had been
really drunked up and had run somebody down. Vern was careful not to
crackle any of the old leaves as he moved. If the two of them found out he
was under the porch and had overheard them, you could have put what was
left of him in a Ken-L-Ration dogfood can.
'It's nuthin' to us,' Billy Tessio said. "The kid's dead so it's nuthin' to him,
neither. Who gives a fuck if they ever find him? I don't.'
'It was that kid they been talkin' about on the radio,' Charlie said. 'It was,
sure as shit Brocker, Brower, Flowers, whatever his name is. Fuckin' train
must have hit him.'
'Yeah,' Billy said. Sound of a scratched match. Vern saw it flicked into
the gravel driveway and then smelled cigarette smoke. 'It sure did. And you
puked.'
No words, but Vern sensed emotional waves of shame radiating off
Charlie
Hogan.
'Well, the girls didn't see it,' Billy said after a while. 'Lucky break.' From
the sound, he clapped Charlie on the back to buck him up. "They'd blab it
from here to Portland. We tore out of there fast, though. You think they
knew there was something wrong?'
'No,' Charlie said, 'Marie don't like to go down that Back Harlow Road
past the cemetery, anyway. She's afraid of ghosts.' Then again in that scared
cry-baby voice: 'Jesus, I wish we'd never boosted no car last night! Just
gone to the show like we was gonna!'
Charlie and Billy went with a couple of scags named Marie Daughtery
and Beverly Thomas; you never saw such gross-looking broads outside of a
carnival show-pimples, moustaches, the whole works. Sometimes the four
of them -or maybe six or eight if Fuzzy Brackowicz or Ace Merrill were
along with their girls-would boost a car from a Lewiston parking lot and go
joyriding out into the country with two or three bottles of Wild Irish Rose
wine and a six-pack of ginger ale. They'd take the girls parking somewhere
in Castle View or Harlow or Shiloh, drink Purple Jesuses, and make out.
Then they'd dump the car somewhere near home. Cheap thrills in the
monkeyhouse, as Chris sometimes said. They'd never been caught at it, but
Vern kept hoping. He really dug the idea of visiting Billy on Sundays at the
reformatory.
'If we told the cops, they'd want to know how we got way the hell out in
Harlow,' Billy said. 'We ain't got no car, neither of us. It's better if we just
keep our mouths shut. Then they can't touch us.'
'We could make a nonnamus call,' Charlie said.
"They trace those fuckin* calls,' Billy said ominously. 'I seen it on
Highway Patrol. And Dragnet.'
'Yeah, right,' Charlie said miserably. 'Jesus. I wish Ace'd been with us.
We could have told the cops we was in his car.'
'Well, he wasn't'
'Yeah,' Charlie said. He sighed. 'I guess you're right' A cigarette butt
flicked into the driveway. 'We hadda walk up and take a piss by the tracks,
didn't we? Couldn't walk the other way, could we? And I got puke on my
new Keds.' His voice sank a little. 'Fuckin' kid was laid right out, you know
it? Didja see that sonofawhore, Billy?'
'I seen him,' Billy said, and a second cigarette butt joined the first in the
driveway. 'Let's go see if Ace is up. I want some juice.'
'We gonna tell him?'
'Charlie, we ain't gonna tell nobody. Nobody never. You dig me?'
'I dig you,' Charlie said. 'Christ-Jesus, I wish we never boosted that
fuckin'
Dodge.'
'Aw, shut the fuck up and come on.'
Two pairs of legs clad in tight, wash-faded pegged jeans, two pairs of feet
in black engineer boots with side-buckles, came down the steps. Vern froze
on his hands and knees ('My balls crawled up so high I thought they was
trine to get back home,' he told us), sure his brother would sense him
beneath the porch and drag him out and kill him-he and Charlie Hogan
would kick the few brains the good Lord had seen fit to give him right out
his jug ears and then stomp him with their engineer boots. But they just kept
going and when Vern was sure they were really gone, he had crawled out
from under the porch and run here.
5
'You're really lucky,' I said. 'They would have killed you.'
Teddy said, 'I know the Back Harlow Road. It comes to a dead end by the
river. We used to fish for cossies out there.'
Chris nodded. 'There used to be a bridge, but there was a flood. A long
time ago. Now there's just the train-tracks.'
'Could a kid really have gotten all the way from Chamberlain to Harlow?'
I asked Chris. That's twenty or thirty miles.'
'I think so. He probably happened on the train tracks and followed them
the whole way. Maybe he thought they'd take him out, or maybe he thought
he could flag down a train if he had to. But that's just a freight run now-
GS&WM up to Derry and Brownsville-and not many of those anymore.
He'd had to've walked all the way to Castle Rock to get out. After dark a
train must have finally come along and el smacko.' Chris drove his right
fist down against his left palm, making a flat noise. Teddy, a veteran of
many close calls dodging the pulp-trucks on 196, looked vaguely pleased. I
felt a little sick, imagining the kid so far away from home, scared to death
but doggedly following the GS&WM tracks, probably walking on the ties
because of the night-noises from the overhanging trees and bushes maybe
even from the culverts underneath the railroad bed. And here comes the
train, and maybe the big headlight on the front hypnotised him until it was
too late to jump. Or maybe he was just lying there on the tracks in a hunger-
faint when the train came along. Either way, any way, Chris had the straight
of it: el smacko had been the final result. The kid was dead.
'So anyway, you want to go see it?' Vern asked. He was squirming around
like he had to go to the bathroom he was so excited.
We all looked at him for a long second, no one saying anything. Then
Chris tossed his cards down and said, 'Sure! And I bet you anything we get
our pictures in the paper!'
'Huh?' Vern said.
'Yeah?' Teddy said, and grinned his crazy truck-dodging grin. 'Look,'
Chris said, leaning across the ratty card-table. 'We can find the body and
report it!
Well be on the news!'
'I dunno,' Vern said, obviously taken aback. 'Billy will know where I
found out. He'll beat the living shit outta me.'
'No he won't,' I said, 'because it'll be us guys that find that kid, not Billy
and Charlie Hogan in a boosted car. Then they won't have to worry about it
anymore. They'll probably pin a medal on you, Penny.'
'Yeah?' Vern grinned, showing his bad teeth. It was a dazed sort of grin,
as if the thought of Billy being pleased with anything he did had acted on
him like a hard shot to the chin.
'Yeah, you think so?'
Teddy was grinning, too. Then he frowned and said, 'Oh-oh.'
'What?' Vern asked. He was squirming again, afraid that some really
basic objection to the idea had just cropped up in Teddy's mind or what
passed for Teddy's mind.
'Our folks,' Teddy said. 'If we find that kid's body over in South Harlow
tomorrow, they're gonna know we didn't spend the night campin* out in
Vern's back field.'
'Yeah,' Chris said. They'll know we went lookin' for that kid.'
'No they won't,' I said. I felt funny-both excited and scared because I
knew we could do it and get away with it. The mixture of emotions made
me feel heatsick and headachey. I picked up the Bikes to have something to
do with my hands and started box-shuffling them. That and how to play
cribbage was about all I got for older brother stuff from Dennis. The other
kids envied that shuffle, and I guess everyone I knew had asked me to show
them how it went everyone except Chris. I guess only Chris knew that
showing someone would be like giving away a piece of Dennis, and I just
didn't have so much of him that I could afford to pass pieces around.
I said: 'We'll just tell 'em we got bored tenting in Vern's field because
we've done it so many times before. So we decided to hike up the tracks and
have a campout in the woods. I bet we don't even get hided for it because
everybody'll be so excited about what we found.'
'My dad'll hide me anyway,' Chris said. 'He's on a really mean streak this
time.' He shook his head sullenly. 'To hell, it's worth a hiding.'
'Okay,' Teddy said, getting up. He was still grinning like crazy, ready to
break into his high-pitched, cackling laugh at any second. 'Let's all get
together at Vern's house after lunch. What can we tell 'em about supper?'
Chris said, 'You and me and Gordie can say we're eating at Vern's.'
'And I'll tell my mom I'm eating over at Chris's,' Vern said.
That would work unless there was some emergency we couldn't control
or unless any of the parents got together. And neither Vern's folks or Chris's
had a phone. Back then there were a lot of families which still considered a
telephone a luxury, especially families of the shirttail variety. And none of
us came from the upper crust.
My dad was retired. Vern's dad worked in the mill and was still driving a
1952 DeSoto.
Teddy's mom had a house on Danberry Street and she took in a boarder
whenever she could get one. She didn't have one that summer; the
FURNISHED ROOM TO LET sign had been up in the parlour window
since June. And Chris's dad was always on a 'mean streak', more or less; he
was a drunk who got welfare off and on-mostly on-and spent most of his
time hanging out in Sukey's Tavern with Junior Merrill, Ace Merrill's old
man, and a couple of other local rumpots.
Chris didn't talk much about his dad, but we all knew he hated him like
poison. Chris was marked up every two weeks or so, bruises on his cheeks
and neck or one eye swelled up and as colourful as a sunset, and once he
came into school with a big clumsy bandage on the back of his head. Other
times he never got to school at all. His mom would call him in sick because
he was too lamed up to come in. Chris was smart, really smart, but he
played truant a lot, and Mr. Halliburton, the town truant officer, was always
showing up at Chris's house, driving his old black Chevrolet with the NO
RIDERS sticker in the corner of the windshield. If Chris was being truant
and Bertie (as we called him-always behind his back, of course) caught
him, he would haul him back to school and see that Chris got detention for
a week. But if Bertie found out that Chris was home because his father had
beaten the shit out of him, Bertie just went away and didn't say boo to a
cuckoo-bird. It never occurred to me to question this set of priorities until
about twenty years later. The year before, Chris had been suspended from
school for two weeks. A bunch of milk-money disappeared when it was
Chris's turn to be room-monitor and collect it, and because he was a
Chambers from those no-account Chamberses, he had to take a walk even
though he always swore he never hawked that money. That was the time Mr
Chambers put Chris in the hospital for an overnight stay, when his dad
heard Chris was suspended, he broke Chris's nose and his right wrist. Chris
came from a bad family, all right, and everybody thought he would turn out
bad including Chris. His brothers had lived up to the town's expectations
admirably. Dave, the eldest, ran away from home when he was seventeen,
joined the Navy, and ended up doing a long stretch in Portsmouth for rape
and criminal assault. The next eldest, Richard (his right eye was all funny
and jittery, which was why everybody called him Eyeball), had dropped out
of high school in the tenth grade, and chummed around with Charlie and
Billy Tessio and their buddies.
'I think all that'll work,' I told Chris. 'What about John and Marty?' John
and Marty DeSpain were two other members of our regular gang. 'They're
still away,' Chris said. 'They won't be back until Monday.'
'Oh. That's too bad.'
'So are we set?' Vern asked, still squirming. He didn't want the
conversation sidetracked even for a minute.
'I guess we are,' Chris said. 'Who wants to play some more scat?' No one
did. We were too excited to play cards. We climbed down from the
treehouse, climbed the fence into the vacant lot, and played three-flies-six-
grounders for a while with Vein's old friction-taped baseball, but that was
no fun, either. All we could think about was that kid Brower, hit by a train,
and how we were going to see him, or what was left of him. Around ten
o'clock we all drifted away home to fix it with our parents.
I got to my house at quarter to eleven, after stopping at the drugstore to
check out the paperbacks. I did that every couple of days to see if there
were any new John D MacDonalds. I had a quarter and I figured if there
was, I'd take it along. But there were only the old ones, and I'd read most of
those half a dozen times.
When I got home the car was gone and I remembered that my mom and
some of her henparty friends had gone to Boston to see a concert. A great
old concert-goer, my mother. And why not? Her only kid was dead and she
had to do something to take her mind off it.
I guess that sounds pretty bitter. And I guess if you'd been there, you'd
understand why I felt that way.
Dad was out back, passing a fine spray from the hose over his ruined
garden. If you couldn't tell it was a lost cause from his glum face, you sure
could by looking at the garden itself. The soil was light, powdery grey.
Everything in it was dead except for the corn, which had never grown so
much as a single edible ear. Dad said he'd never known how to water a
garden; it had to be mother nature or nobody. He'd water too long in one
spot and drown the plants. In the next row, plants were dying of thirst. He
could never hit a happy medium. But he didn't talk about it often. He'd lost
a son in April and a garden in August. And if he didn't want to talk about
either one, I guess that was his privilege. It just bugged me that he'd given
up talking about everything else, too. That was taking democracy too
fucking far.
'Hi, daddy,' I said, standing beside him. I offered him the Rollos I'd
bought at the drugstore. 'Want one?'
'Hello, Gordon. No thanks.' He kept flicking the fine spray over the
hopeless grey earth.
'Be okay if I camp out in Vern Tessio's back field tonight with some of
the
guys?'
'What guys?'
'Vern. Teddy Duchamp. Maybe Chris.' I expected him to start right in on
Chris-how Chris was bad company, a rotten apple from the bottom of the
barrel, a thief, and an apprentice juvenile delinquent. But he just sighed and
said, 'I suppose it's okay.'
'Great!
Thanks!'
I turned to go into the house and check out what was on the boob tube
when he stopped me with: 'Those are the only people you want to be with,
aren't they, Gordon?'
I looked back at him, braced for an argument, but there was no argument
in him that morning. It would have been better if there had been, I think.
His shoulders were slumped. His face, pointed towards the dead garden and
not towards me, sagged. There was a certain unnatural sparkle in his eyes
that might have been tears.
'Aw, dad, they're okay -'
'Of course they are. A thief and two feebs. Fine company for my son.'
'Vern Tessio isn't feeble,' I said. Teddy was a harder case to argue.
Twelve years old and still in the fifth grade,' my dad said. 'And that time
he slept over. When the Sunday paper came the next morning, he took an
hour and a half to read the funnypages.'
That made me mad, because I didn't think he was being fair. He was
judging Vern the way he judged all my friends, from having seen them off
and on, mostly going in and out of the house. He was wrong about them.
And when he called Chris a thief I always saw red, because he didn't know
anything about Chris. I wanted to tell
him that, but if I pissed him off he'd keep me home. And he wasn't really
mad anyway, not like he got at the supper-table sometimes, ranting so loud
that nobody wanted to eat. Now he just looked sad and tired out and used.
He was sixty three years old, old enough to be my grandfather.
My mom was fifty-five-no spring chicken, either. When she and dad got
married they tried to start a family right away and my mom got pregnant
and had a miscarriage. She miscarried two more and the doctor told her
she'd never be able to carry a baby to term. I got all of this stuff, chapter and
verse, whenever one of them was lecturing me, you understand. They
wanted me to think I was a special delivery from God and I wasn't
appreciating my great good fortune in being conceived when my mother
was forty-two and starting to grey. I wasn't appreciating my great good
fortune and I wasn't appreciating her tremendous pain and sacrifices, either.
Five years after the doctor said mom would never have a baby she got
pregnant with Dennis. She carried him for eight months and then he just
sort of fell out, all eight pounds of him-my father used to say that if she had
carried Dennis to term, the kid would have weighed fifteen pounds. The
doctor said, Well, sometimes nature fools us, but he'll be the only one you'll
ever have. Thank God for him and be content. Ten years later she got
pregnant with me. She not only carried me to term, the doctor had to use
forceps to yank me out. Did you ever hear of such a fucked-up family? I
came into the world the child of two Geritol-chuggers, not to go on and on
about it, and my only brother was playing league baseball in the big kids'
park before I even got out of diapers. In the case of my mom and dad, one
gift from God had been enough. I won't say they treated me badly, and they
sure never beat me, but I was a hell of a big surprise and I guess when you
get into your forties you're not as partial to surprises as you were in your
twenties. After I was born, Mom got that operation her hen-party friends
referred to as 'the Band-Aid'. I guess she wanted to make a hundred per cent
sure that there wouldn't be any more gifts from God. When I got to college I
found out I'd beaten long odds just by not being born retarded although I
think my dad had his doubts when he saw my friend Vern taking ten
minutes to puzzle out the dialogue in Beetle Bailey. This business about
being ignored: I could never really pin it down until I did a book report in
high school on this novel called Invisible Man. When I agreed to do the
book for Miss Hardy I thought it was going to be the science fiction story
about the guy in bandages and Foster Grants-Claude Rains played him in
the movies. When I found out this was a different story I tried to give the
book back but Miss Hardy wouldn't let me off the hook. I ended up being
real glad. This Invisible Man is about a Negro. Nobody ever notices him at
all unless he fucks up. People look right through him. When he talks,
nobody answers. He's like a black ghost. Once I got into it, I ate that book
up like it was a John D MacDonald, because that cat Ralph Ellison was
writing about me. At the supper table it was Denny how many did you
strike out and Denny who asked you to the Sadie Hopkins dance and Denny
I want to talk to you man to man about that car we were looking at. I'd say,
'Pass the butter', and Dad would say, Denny, are you sure the army is what
you want? I'd say, 'Pass the butter someone, okay?' and Mom would ask
Denny if he wanted her to pick him up one of the Pendleton shirts on sale
downtown, and I'd end up getting the butter myself. One night when I was
nine, just to see what would happen, I said, 'Please pass those goddam
spuds.' And my Mom said, Denny, Auntie Grace called today and she asked
after you and Gordon.
The night Dennis graduated with honours from Castle Rock High School
I played sick and stayed home. I got Stevie Darabont's oldest brother Royce
to buy me a bottle of Wild Irish Rose and I drank half of it and puked in my
bed in the middle of the night. In a family situation like that, you're
supposed to either hate the older brother or idolize him hopelessly-at least
that's what they teach you in college psychology. Bullshit, right? But so far
as I can tell, I didn't feel either way about Dennis. We rarely argued and
never had a fist-fight. That would have been ridiculous. Can you see a
fourteen-year-old boy finding something to beat up his four-year-old
brother about? And our folks were always a little too impressed with him to
burden him with the care of his kid brother, so he never resented me the
way some older kids come to resent their sibs. When Denny took me with
him somewhere, it was of his own free will, and those were some of the
happiest times I can remember.
'Hey Lachance, who the fuck is that?'
'My kid brother and you better watch your mouth, Davis. He'll beat the
crap out of you. Gordie's tough.'
They gather around me for a moment, huge, impossibly tall, just a
moment of interest like a patch of sun. They are so big, they are so old.
'Hey kid! This wet end really your big brother?'
I nod shyly.
'He's a real asshole, ain't he, kid?'
I nod again and everybody, Dennis included, roars with laughter. Then
Dennis claps his hands together twice, briskly, and says: 'Come on, we
gonna have a practice or stand around here like a bunch of pussies?'
They run to their positions, already peppering the ball around the infield.
'Go sit over there on the bench, Gordie. Be quiet. Don't bother anybody.'
I go sit over there on the bench. I am good. I feel impossibly small under
the sweet summer clouds. I watch my brother pitch. I don't bother anybody.
But there weren't many times like that.
Sometimes he read me bedtime stories that were better than mom's;
mom's stories were about the Gingerbread Man and the Three Little Pigs,
okay stuff, but Dennis's were about stuff like Bluebeard and Jack the
Ripper. He also had a version of Billy Goat's Gruff where the troll under the
bridge ended up the winner. And, as I have already said, he taught me the
game of cribbage and how to do a box-shuffle. Not that much, but hey! in
this world you take what you can get, am I right?
As I grew older, my feelings of love for Dennis were replaced with an
almost clinical awe, the kind of awe so-so Christians feel for God, I guess.
And when he died, I was mildly shocked and mildly sad, the way I imagine
those same so-so Christians must have felt when Time magazine said God
was dead. Let me put it this way: I was as sad for Denny's dying as I was
when I heard on the radio that Dan Blocker had died. I'd seen them both
about as frequently, and Denny never ever got any re-runs.
He was buried in a closed coffin with the American flag on top (they took
the flag off the box before they finally stuck it in the ground and folded it-
the flag, not the box-into a cocked hat and gave it to my mom). My parents
just fell to pieces. Six months hadn't been long enough to put them back
together again; I didn't know if they'd ever be whole again. Mr and Mrs
Dumpty. Denny's room was in suspended animation just one door down
from my room, suspended animation or maybe in a time-warp. The ivy-
league college pennants were still on the walls, and the senior pictures of
the girls he had dated were still tucked into the mirror where he had stood
for what seemed like hours at a stretch, combing his hair back into a
ducktail like Elvis's. The stack of Trues and Sports Illustrateds remained on
his desk, their dates looking more and more antique as time passed. It's the
kind of thing you see in sticky-sentimental movies. But it wasn't
sentimental to me; it was terrible. I didn't go into
Dennis's room unless I had to because I kept expecting that he would be
behind the door, or under the bed, or in the closet.
Mostly it was the closet that preyed on my mind, and if my mother sent
me in to get Denny's postcard album or his shoebox of photographs so she
could look at them, I would imagine that door swinging slowly open while I
stood rooted to the spot with horror. I would imagine him pallid and bloody
in the darkness, the side of his head walloped in, a grey-veined cake of
blood and brains drying on his shirt. I would imagine his arms coming up,
his bloody hands hooking into claws, and he would be croaking: It should
have been you, Gordon. It should have been you.
7
Stud City, by Gordon Lachance. Originally published in Greenspun
Quarterly, issue 45, Fall, 1970. Used by permission of the author.
March.
Chico stands at the window, arms crossed, elbows on the ledge that
divides upper and lower panes, naked, looking out, breath fogging the glass.
A draught against his belly.
Bottom right pane is gone. Blocked by a piece of cardboard.
'Chico.'
He doesn't turn. She doesn't speak again. He can see a ghost of her in the
glass, in his bed, sitting, blankets pulled up in apparent defiance of gravity.
Her eye makeup has smeared into deep hollows under her eyes.
Chico shifts his gaze beyond her ghost, out beyond the house. Raining.
Patches of snow sloughed away to reveal the bald ground underneath. He
sees last year's dead grass, a plastic toy-Billy's-a rusty rake. His brother
Johnny's Dodge is up on blocks, the de-tired wheels sticking out like
stumps. He remembers times he and Johnny worked on it, listening to the
superhits and boss oldies from WLAM in Lewiston pour out of Johnny's old
transistor radio-a couple of times Johnny would give him a beer. She gonna
run fast, Chico, Johnny would say. She gonna eat up everything on this road
from Gates Falls to Castle Rock. Wait till we get that Hearst shifter in her!
But that had been then, and this was now.
Beyond Johnny's Dodge was the highway. Route 14, goes to Portland and
New Hampshire south, all the way to Canada north, if you turned left on US
1 at Thomaston.
'Stud city,' Chico says to the glass. He smokes his cigarette.
'What?'
'Nothing, babe.'
'Chico?' Her voice is puzzled. He will have to change the sheets before
Dad gets back.
She bled.
'What?'
'I love you, Chico.'
'That's right.'
Dirty March. You're some old whore, Chico thinks. Dirty, staggering old
baggy-tits March with rain in her face.
'This room used to be Johnny's,' he says suddenly.
'Who?'
'My brother.'
'Oh. Where is he?'
'In the Army,' Chico says, but Johnny isn't in the Army. He had been
working the summer before at Oxford Plains Speedway and a car went out
of control and skidded across the infield towards the pit area, where Johnny
had been changing the back tires on a Chevy charger-class stocker. Some
guys shouted at him to look out, but Johnny never heard them. One of the
guys who shouted was Johnny's brother Chico.
'Aren't you cold?' she asks.
'No. Well, my feet. A little.'
And he thinks suddenly: Well, my God. Nothing happened to Johnny that
isn't going to happen to you too, sooner or later. He sees it again, though:
the skidding, skating Ford Mustang, the knobs of his brother's spine picked
out in a series of dimpled shadows against the white of his Haines T-shirt;
he had been hunkered down, pulling one of the Chevy's back tires. There
had been time to see rubber flaying off the tires of the runaway Mustang, to
see its hanging muffler scraping up sparks from the infield. It had struck
Johnny even as Johnny tried to get to his feet. Then the yellow shout of
flame.
Well, Chico thinks, it could have been slow, and he thinks of his
grandfather. Hospital smells. Pretty young nurses bearing bedpans. A last
papery breath. Were there any good ways?
He shivers and wonders about God. He touches the small silver St
Christopher's medal that hangs on a chain around his neck. He is not a
Catholic and he's surely not a Mexican: his real name is Edward May and
his friends all call him Chico because his hair is black and he greases it
back with Brylcreem and he wears boots with pointed toes and Cuban heels.
Not Catholic, but he wears this medallion. Maybe if Johnny had been
wearing one, the runaway Mustang would have missed him. You never
knew.
He smokes and stares out the window and behind him the girl gets out of
bed and comes to him quickly, almost mincing, maybe afraid he will turn
around and look at her. She puts a warm hand on his back. Her breasts push
against his side. Her belly touches his buttock.
'Oh. It is cold.'
'It's this place.'
'Do you love me, Chico?'
'You bet!' he says offhandedly, and then, more seriously: 'You were
cherry.'
'What does that-'
'You were a virgin.'
The hand reaches higher. One finger traces the skin on the nape of his
neck. 'I said, didn't I?'
'Was it hard? Did it hurt?'
She laughs. 'No. But I was scared.'
They watch the rain. A new Oldsmobile goes by on 14, spraying up
water.
'Stud City,' Chico says.
'What?'
'That guy. He's going Stud City. In his new stud car.'
She kisses the place her finger has been touching gently and he brushes at
her as if she were a fly.
'What's the matter?'
He turns to her. Her eyes flick down to his penis and then up again
hastily. Her arms twitch to cover herself, and then she remembers that they
never do stuff like that in the movies and she drops them to her sides again.
Her hair is black and her skin is winter white, the colour of cream. He
breasts are firm, her belly perhaps a little too soft. One flaw to remind,
Chico thinks, that this isn't the movies.
'Jane?'
'What?' He can feel himself getting ready. Not beginning, but getting
ready. 'It's all right, ' he said. 'We're friends. ' He eyes her deliberately,
letting himself reach at her in all sorts of ways. When he looks at her face
again, it is flushed. 'Do you mind me looking at you?'
'I no. No, Chico.'
She steps back, closes her eyes, sits on the bed, and leans back, legs
spread. He sees all of her. The muscles, the little muscles on the inside of
her thighs they're jumping, uncontrolled, and this suddenly excites him
more than the taut cones of her breasts or the mild pink pearl of her cunt.
Excitement trembles in him, some stupid Bozo on a spring. Love may be as
divine as the poets say, he thinks, but sex is Bozo the clown bouncing
around on a spring. How could a woman look at an erect penis without
going off into mad gales of laughter?
The rain beats against the roof, against the window, against the sodden
cardboard patch blocking the glassless lower pane. He presses his hand
against his chest, looking for a moment like a stage Roman about to orate.
His hand is cold. He drops it to his side. 'Open your eyes. We're friends, I
said.'
Obediently, she opens them. She looks at him. Her eyes appear violet
now. The rainwater running down the window makes rippling patterns on
her face, her neck, her breasts. Stretched across the bed, her belly has been
pulled tight. She is perfect in her moment. 'Oh,' she says. 'Oh Chico, it feels
so funny,' A shiver goes through her. She has curled her toes involuntarily.
He can see the insteps of her feet. Her insteps are pink. 'Chico. Chico.' He
steps towards her. His body is shivering and her eyes widen. She says
something, one word, but he can't tell what it is. This isn't the time to ask.
He half-kneels before her for just a second, looking at the floor with
frowning concentration, touching her legs just above the knees. He
measures the tide within himself. Its pull is thoughtless, fantastic. He pauses
a little longer.
The only sound is the tinny tick of the alarm clock on the bedtable,
standing brassy-legged atop a pile of Spiderman comic books. Her
breathing flutters faster and faster. His muscles slide smoothly as he dives
upward and forward. They begin. It's better this time. Outside, the rain goes
on washing away the snow.
A half-hour later Chico shakes her out of a light doze. 'We gotta move,'
he says. 'Dad and Virginia will be home pretty quick.'
She looks at her wristwatch and sits up. This time she makes no attempt
to shield herself. Her whole tone-her body English-has changed. She has
not matured (although she probably believes she has) nor learned anything
more complex than tying a shoe, but her tone has changed just the same. He
nods and she smiles tentatively at him. He reaches for the cigarettes on the
bedtable. As she draws on her panties, he thinks of a line from an old
novelty song: Keep playin' till I shoot through, Blue play your didgeridoo.
'Tie Me Kangaroo Down', by Rolf Harris. He grins. That was a song Johnny
used to sing. It ended, So we tanned his hide when he died, Clyde,
and that's it hanging on the shed. She hooks her bra and begins buttoning
her blouse. 'What are you smiling about, Chico?'
'Nothing,' he says. 'Zip me up?'
He goes to her, still naked, and zips her up. He kisses her cheek. 'Go on
in the bathroom and do your face if you want,' he says. 'Just don't take too
long, okay?'
She goes up the hall gracefully, and Chico watches her, smoking. She is a
tall girl-taller than he-and she has to duck her head a little going through the
bathroom door. Chico finds his underpants under the bed. He puts them in
the dirty clothes bag hanging just inside the closet door, and gets another
pair from the bureau. He puts them on, and then, while walking back to the
bed, he slips and almost falls in a patch of wetness the square of cardboard
has let in.
'Goddam,' he whispers resentfully.
He looks around at the room, which had been Johnny's until Johnny died
(why did I tell her he was in the Army, for Christ's sake! he wonders a
little uneasily). Fibreboard walls, so thin he can hear Dad and Virginia
going at it at night, that don't quite make it all the way to the ceiling. The
floor has a slightly crazy hipshot angle so that the room's door will only
stay open if you block it open-if you forget, it swings stealthily closed as
soon as your back is turned. On the far wall is a movie poster from Easy
Rider-Two Men Went Looking for America and Couldn't Find it Anywhere.
The room had more life when Johnny lived here. Chico doesn't know how
or why, only that it's true. And he knows something else, as well. He knows
that sometimes the room spooks him at night.
Sometimes he thinks that the closet door will swing open and Johnny will
be standing there, his body charred and twisted and blackened, his teeth
yellow dentures poking out of wax that has partially melted and re-
hardened; and Johnny will be whispering: Get out of my room, Chico. And
if you lay a hand on my Dodge, I'll fuckin' kill you. Got it?
Got it, bro, Chico thinks.
For a moment he stands still, looking at the rumpled sheet spotted with
the girl's blood, and then he spreads the blankets up in one quick gesture.
Here. Right here. How do you like that, Virginia? How does that grab your
snatch? He puts on his pants, his engineer boots, finds a sweater.
He's dry-combing his hair in front of the mirror when she comes out of
the John. She looks classy. Her too-soft stomach doesn't show in the jumper.
She looks at the bed, does a couple of things to it, and it comes out looking
made instead of just spread up.
'Good,' Chico says.
She laughs a little self-consciously and pushes a lock of hair behind her
ear. It is an evocative, poignant gesture.
'Let's go,' he says.
They go out through the hall and the living room. Jane pauses in front of
the tinted studio photograph on top of the TV. It shows his father and
Virginia, a high-school-age Johnny, a grammar-school-age Chico, and an
infant Billy -in the picture, Johnny is holding Billy.
All of them have fixed, stoned grins all except Virginia, whose face is
its sleepy, indecipherable self. That picture, Chico remembers, was taken
less than a month after his Dad married the bitch.
That your mother and father?'
'It's my father,' Chico said. 'She's my step-mother, Virginia. Come on.'
'Is she still that pretty?' Jane asks, picking up her coat and handing Chico
his windbreaker.
'I guess my old man thinks so,' Chico says.
They step out into the shed. It's a damp and draughty place-the wind
hoots through the cracks in its slapstick walls. There is a pile of old bald
tyres, Johnny's old bike that Chico inherited when he was ten and which he
promptly wrecked, a pile of detective magazines, returnable Pepsi bottles, a
greasy monolithic engine block, an orange crate full of paperback books, an
old paint-by-the-numbers of a horse standing on dusty green grass.
Chico helps her pick her way outside. The rain is falling with
disheartening steadiness.
Chico's old sedan stands in a driveway puddle, looking downhearted.
Even up on blocks and with a red piece of plastic covering the place where
the windshield should go, Johnny's Dodge has more class. Chico's car is a
Buick. The paint is dull and flowered with spots of rust. The front seat
upholstery has been covered with a brown Army Blanket. A large button
pinned to the sun visor on the passenger side says: I WANT IT EVERY
DAY. There is a rusty starter assembly on the back seat; if it ever stops
raining he will clean it, he thinks, and maybe put it into the Dodge. Or
maybe not The Buick smells musty and his own starter grinds a long time
before the Buick starts up.
'Is it your battery?' she asks.
'Just the goddam rain, I guess.' He backs out onto the road, flicking on
the windshield wipers and pausing for a moment to look at the house. It is a
completely unappetizing aqua colour. The shed sticks off from it at a ragtag,
double-jointed angle, tarpaper and peeled -looking shingles.
The radio comes on with a blare and Chico shuts it off at once. There is
the beginning of a Sunday afternoon headache behind his forehead. They
ride past the Grange hall and the Volunteer Fire Department and Brownie's
Store. Sally Morrison's T-Bird is parked by Brownie's hi-test pump, and
Chico raises a hand to her as he turns off onto the old Lewiston road.
'Who's that?'
'Sally Morrison.'
'Pretty lady.' Very neutral.
He feels for his cigarettes. 'She's been married twice and divorced twice.
Now she's the town pump, if you believe half the talk that goes on in this
shitass little town.'
'She looks young.'
'She is.'
'Have you ever -'
He slides his hand up her leg and smiles. 'No,' he says. 'My brother,
maybe, but not me. I like Sally, though. She's got her alimony and her big
white Bird, and she doesn't care what people say about her.'
It starts to seem like a long drive. The Androscoggin, off to the right, is
slaty and sullen.
The ice is all out of it now. Jane has grown quiet and thoughtful. The
only sound is the steady snap of the windshield wipers. When the car rolls
through the dips in the road there is groundfog, waiting for evening when it
will creep out of these pockets and take over the whole River Road.
They cross into Auburn and Chico drives the cutoff and swings onto
Minot Avenue. The four lanes are nearly deserted, and all the suburban
homes look
packaged. They see one little boy in a yellow plastic raincoat walking up
the sidewalk, carefully stepping in all the puddles.
'Go, man,' Chico says softly.
'What?'Jane asks.
'Nothing, babe. Go back to sleep.'
She laughs a little doubtfully.
Chico turns up Keston Street and into the driveway of one of the
packaged houses. He doesn't turn off the ignition. 'Come in and I'll give you
cookies,' she says. He shakes his head. 'I have to get back.'.
'I know.' She puts her arms around him and kisses him. "Thank you for
the most wonderful time of my life.'
He smiles suddenly. His face shines. It is nearly magical. 'I'll see you
Monday, Janey-Jane. Still friends, right?'
'You know we are,' she says, and kisses him again but when he cups a
breast through her jumper, she pulls away. 'Don't. My father might see.'
He lets her go, only a little of the smile left. She gets out of the car
quickly and runs through the rain to the back door. A second later she's
gone. Chico pauses for a moment to light a cigarette and then he backs out
of the driveway. The Buick stalls and the starter seems to grind forever
before the engine manages to catch. It is a long ride home. When he gets
there, Dad's station wagon is parked in the driveway. He pulls in beside it
and lets the engine die. For a moment he sits inside silently, listening to the
rain. It is like being inside a steel drum.
Inside, Billy is watching Carl Stormer and his Country Buckaroos on the
TV set When Chico comes in, Billy jumps up, excited. 'Eddie, hey Eddie,
you know what Uncle Pete said? He said him and a whole mess of other
guys sank a Kraut sub in the war! Will you take me to the show next
Saturday?'
'I don't know,' Chico says, grinning. 'Maybe if you kiss my shoes every
night before supper all week.' He pulls Billy's hair. Billy hollers and laughs
and kicks him in the shins. 'Cut it out, now,' Sam May says, coming into the
room. 'Cut it out you two. You know how your mother feels about the
roughhousing.' He has pulled his tie down and unbuttoned the top button of
his shirt. He's got a couple -three red hotdogs on a plate. The hotdogs are
wrapped in white bread, and Sam May has put the old mustard right to
them. 'Where you been, Eddie?'
'At Jane's.'
The toilet flushes in the bathroom. Virginia. Chico wonders briefly if
Jane has left any hairs in the sink, or a lipstick, or a bobby pin.
'You should have come with us to see your Uncle Pete and Aunt Ann,' his
father says. He eats a frank in three quick bites. 'You're getting to be like a
stranger around here, Eddie. I don't like that. Not while we provide the bed
and board.'
'Some bed,' Chico says. 'Some board.'
Sam looks up quickly, hurt at first, then angry. When he speaks, Chico
sees that his teeth are yellow with French's mustard. He feels vaguely
nauseated. 'Your lip. Your goddam lip. You aren't too big yet, snotnose.'
Chico shrugs, peels a slice of Wonder Bread off the loaf standing on the
TV tray by his father's chair, and spreads it with ketchup. 'In three months
I'm going to be gone anyway.'
'What the hell are you talking about?'
'I'm gonna fix up Johnny's car and go out to California. Look for work.'
'Oh yeah. Right.' He is a big man, big in a shambling way, but Chico
thinks now that he got smaller after he married Virginia, and smaller again
after Johnny died.
And in his mind he hears himself saying to Jane: My brother, maybe. Not
me. And on the heels of that: Play your didgeridoo, Blue. 'You ain't never
going to get that car as far as Castle Rock, let alone Canada.'
'You don't think so? Just watch my fucking dust.'
For a moment his father only looks at him and then he throws the frank
he has been holding. It hits Chico in the chest, spraying mustard on his
sweater and on the chair. 'Say that word again and I'll break your nose for
you, smartass.'
Chico picks up the frank and looks at it. Cheap red frank, smeared with
French's mustard. Spread a little sunshine. He throws it back at his father.
Sam gets up, his face the colour of an old brick, the vein in the middle of
his forehead pulsing. His thigh connects with the TV tray and it overturns.
Billy stands in the kitchen doorway watching them. He's gotten himself a
plate of franks and beans and the plate has tipped and bean-juice runs onto
the floor. Billy's eyes are wide, his mouth trembling. On the TV, Carl
Stormer and his Country Buckaroos are tearing through Long Black Veil at
a breakneck pace. 'You raise them up best you can and they spit on you,' his
father says thickly. 'Ayuh. That's how it goes. He gropes blindly on the seat
of his chair and comes up with the half-eaten hotdog. He holds it in his fist
like a severed phallus. Incredibly, he begins to eat it at the same time,
Chico sees that he has begun to cry. 'Ayuh, they spit on you, that's just how
it goes.'
'Well, why in the hell did you have to marry her?' he bursts out, and then
has to bite down on the rest of it: If you hadn't married her, Johnny would
still be alive. 'That's none of your goddam business!' Sam May roars
through his tears. "That's my business!'
'Oh?' Chico shouts back. 'Is that so? I only have to live with her! Me and
Billy, we have to live with her! Watch her grind you down! And you don't
even know -'
'What?' his father says, and his voice is suddenly low and ominous. The
chunk of hotdog left in his closed fist is like a bloody chunk of bone. 'What
don't I know?'
'You don't know shit from Shinola,' he says, appalled at what has almost
come out of his mouth.
'You want to stop it now,' his father says. 'Or I'll beat the hell out of you,
Chico.' He only calls him this when he is very angry indeed.
Chico turns and sees that Virginia is standing at the other side of the
room, adjusting her skirt minutely, looking at him with her large, calm,
brown eyes. Her eyes are beautiful; the rest of her is not so beautiful, so
self-renewing, but those eyes will carry her for years yet, Chico thinks, and
he feels the sick hate come back -So we tanned his hide when he died,
Clyde, and that's it hanging on the shed.
'She's got you pussywhipped and you don't have the guts to do anything
about it!' All of this shouting has finally become too much for Billy -he
gives a great wail of terror, drops his plate of franks and beans, and covers
his face with his hands. Bean-juice splatters his Sunday shoes and sprays
across the rug.
Sam takes a single step forward and then stops when Chico makes a curt
beckoning gesture, as if to say: Yeah, come on, let's get down to it, what
took you sofuckin long? They stand like statues until Virginia speaks-her
voice is low, as calm as her brown eyes.
'Have you had a girl in your room, Ed? You know how your father and I
feel about that.' Almost as an afterthought: 'She left a handkerchief.'
He stares at her, savagely unable to express the way he feels, the way she
is dirty, the way she shoots unerringly at the back, the way she clips in
behind you and cuts at your hamstrings.
You could hurt me if you wanted to, the calm brown eyes say. I know you
know what was going on before he died. But that's the only way you can
hurt me, isn't it, Chico? And only then if your father believed you. And if he
believed you, it would kill him.
His father lunges at the new gambit like a bear. 'Have you been screwing
in my house, you little bastard?'
'Watch your language, please, Sam,' Virginia says calmly.
'Is that why you didn't want to come with us? So you could scr-so you
could -'
'Say it!' Chico weeps. 'Don't let her do it to you! Say it! Say what you
mean!'
'Get out,' he says dully. 'Don't you come back until you can apologize to
your mother and me.'
'Don't you dare!' he cries. 'Don't you dare call that bitch my mother! I'll
kill
you!'
'Stop it, Eddie!' Billy screams. The words are muffled, blurred, through
his hands, which still cover his face. 'Stop yelling at daddy! Stop it, please!'
Virginia doesn't move from the doorway. Her calm eyes remain on Chico.
Sam blunders back a step and the back of his knees strike the edge of his
easy-chair. He sits down in it heavily and averts his face against a hairy
forearm. 'I can't even look at you when you got words like that in your
mouth, Eddie. You are making me feel so bad.'
'She makes you feel bad! Why won't you admit it?'
He does not reply. Still not looking at Chico, he fumbles another frank
wrapped in bread from the plate on the TV tray. He fumbles for the
mustard. Billy goes on crying. Carl Stormer and his Country Buckaroos are
singing a truck-driving song. 'My rig is old, but that don't mean she's slow,'
Carl tells all his western Maine viewers.
'The boy doesn't know what he's saying, Sam,' Virginia says gently. 'It's
hard, at his age. It's hard to grow up.'
She's whipped him. That's the end, all right.
He turns and heads for the door which leads first into the shed and then
outdoors. As he opens it he looks back at Virginia, and she gazes at him
tranquilly when he speaks her name.
'What is it, Ed?'
"The sheets are bloody.' He pauses. 'I broke her in.'
He thinks something has stirred in her eyes, but that is probably only his
wish. 'Please go now, Ed. You're scaring Billy.'
He leaves. The Buick doesn't want to start and he has almost resigned
himself to walking in the rain when the engine finally catches. He lights a
cigarette and backs out onto 14, slamming the clutch back in and racing the
mill when it starts to jerk and splutter. The generator light blinks balefully
at him twice, and then the car settles into a rugged die. At last he is on his
way, creeping up the road towards Gates Falls.
He spares Johnny's Dodge one last look.
Johnny could have had steady work at Gates Mills & Weaving, but only
on the night shift. Nightwork didn't bother him, he had told Chico, and the
pay was better than at the Plains, but their father worked days, and working
nights at the mill would have meant Johnny would have been home with
her, home alone or with Chico in the next room and the walls were thin. I
can't stop and she won't let me try, Johnny said. Yeah, I know what it would
do to him. But she's she just won't stop and it's like I
can't stop she's always at me, you know what I mean, you've seen her,
Billy's too young to understand, but you've seen her
Yes. He had seen her. And Johnny had gone to work at the Plains, telling
their father it was because he could get parts for the Dodge on the cheap.
And that's how it happened that he had been changing a tire when the
Mustang came skidding and skating across the infield with its muffler
dragging up sparks; that was how his stepmother had killed his brother, so
just keep playing until I shoot through, Blue, 'cause we goin Stud City right
here in this shitheap Buick, and he remembers how the rubber smelled, and
how the knobs of Johnny's spine cast small crescent shadows on the bright
white of his tee-shirt, he remembers seeing Johnny get halfway up from the
squat he had been working in when the Mustang hit him, squashing him
between it and the Chevy, and there had been a hollow bang as the Chevy
came down off its jacks, and then the bright yellow flare of flame, the rich
smell of gasoline-Chico strikes the brakes with both feet, bringing the sedan
to a crunching, juddering halt on the sodden shoulder. He leans widely
across the seat, throws open the passenger door, and sprays yellow puke
onto the mud and snow. The sight of it makes him puke again, and the
thought of it makes him dry-heave one more time. The car almost stalls, but
he catches it in time. The generator light winks out reluctantly when he
guns the engine. He sits, letting the shakes work their way out of him. A car
goes by fast, a new Ford, white, throwing up great dirty fans of water and
slush. 'Stud City,' Chico says. 'In his new stud car. Funky.'
He tastes puke on his lips and in his throat and coating his sinuses. He
doesn't want a cigarette. Danny Carter will let him sleep over. Tomorrow
will be time enough for further decisions. He pulls back into Route 14 and
gets rolling.
8
Pretty fucking melodramatic, right?
The world has seen one or two better stories, I know that -one or two
hundred thousand better ones, more like it. It ought to have THIS IS A
PRODUCT OF AN UNDERGRADUATE CREATIVE WRITING
WORKSHOP stamped on every page because that's just what it was, at
least up to a certain point. It seems both painfully derivative and painfully
sophomoric to me now; style by Hemingway (except we've got the whole
thing in the present tense for some reason-how too fucking trendy), theme
by Faulkner. Could anything be more serious! More lit'ry?
But even its pretensions can't hide the fact that it's an extremely sexual
story written by an extremely inexperienced young man (at the time I wrote
Stud City, I had been to bed with two girls and had ejaculated prematurely
all over one of them-not much like Chico in the foregoing tale, I guess). Its
attitude towards women goes beyond hostility and to a point which verges
on actual ugliness-two of the women in Stud City are sluts, and the third is
a simple receptacle who says things like 'I love you, Chico,' and 'Come in,
I'll give you cookies.' Chico, on the other hand, is a macho cigarette-
smoking working-class hero who could have stepped whole and breathing
from the grooves of a Bruce Springsteen record-although Springsteen was
yet to be heard from when I published the story in the college literary
magazine (where it ran
between a poem called Images of Me and an essay on student parietals
written entirely in the lower case). It is the work of a young man every bit
as insecure as he was inexperienced. And yet it was the first story I ever
wrote that felt like my story-the first one that really felt whole, after five
years of trying. The first one that might still be able to stand up, even with
its props taken away. Ugly but alive. Even now when I read it, stifling a
smile at its pseudo-toughness and its pretensions, I can see the true face of
Gordon Lachance lurking just behind the lines of print, a Gordon Lachance
younger than the one living and writing now, one certainly more idealistic
than the best-selling novelist who is more apt to have his paperback
contracts reviewed than his books, but not so young as the one who went
with his friends that day to see the body of a dead kid named Ray Brewer. A
Gordon Lachance halfway along in the process of losing the shine. No, it's
not a very good story-its author was too busy listening to other voices to
listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside. But it was
the first time I had ever really used the places I knew and the things I felt in
a piece of fiction, and there was a kind of dreadful exhilaration in seeing
things that had bothered me for years come out in a new form, a form over
which I had imposed control. It had been years since that childhood idea of
Denny being in the closet of his spookily preserved room had occurred to
me; I would have honestly believed I had forgotten it Yet there it is in Stud
City, only slightly changed but controlled.
I've resisted the urge to change it a lot more, to rewrite it, to juice it up-
and that urge was fairly strong, because I find the story quite embarrassing
now. But there are still things in it I like, things that would be cheapened by
changes made by this later Lachance, who has the first threads of grey in his
hair. Things, like that image of the shadows on Johnny's white tee-shirt or
that of the rain-ripples on Jane's naked body, that seem better than they have
any right to be.
Also, it was the first story I never showed to my mother and father. There
was too much Denny in it. Too much Castle Rock. And most of all, too
much 1960. You always know the truth, because when you cut yourself or
someone else with it, you bleed.
9
My room was on the second floor, and it must have been at least ninety
degrees up there.
It would be a hundred and ten by afternoon, even with all the windows
open. I was really glad I wasn't sleeping there that night, and the thought of
where we were going made me excited all over again. I made two blankets
into a bedroll and tied it with my old belt. I collected all my money, which
was sixty-eight cents. Then I was ready to go.
I went down the back stairs to avoid meeting my Dad in front of the
house, but I hadn't needed to worry; he was still out in the garden with the
hose, making useless rainbows in the air and looking through them.
I walked down Summer Street and cut through a vacant lot to Carbine-
where the offices of the Castle Call stand today. I was headed up Carbine
towards the clubhouse when a car pulled over to the kerb and Chris got out.
He had his old Boy
Scout pack in one hand and two blankets rolled up and tied with
clothesrope in the other.
'Thanks, mister,' he said, and trotted over to join me as the car pulled
away. His Boy Scout canteen was slung around his neck and under one arm
so that it finally ended up banging on his hip. His eyes were sparkling.
'Gordie! You wanna see something?'
'Sure, I guess so. What?'
'Come on down here first.' He pointed at the narrow space between the
Blue Point Diner and the Castle Rock Drug Store.
'What is it, Chris?'
'Come on, I said!'
He ran down the alley and after a brief moment (that's all it took me to
cast aside my better judgment) I ran after him. The two buildings were set
slightly towards each other rather than running parallel, and so the alley
narrowed as it went back. We waded through trashy drifts of old
newspapers and stepped over cruel, sparkly nests of broken beer and soda
bottles. Chris cut behind the Blue Point and put his bedroll down. There
were eight or nine garbage cans lined up here and the stench was incredible.
'Phew! Christ Come on, gimme a break!'
'Gimme your arm,' Chris said, by rote.
'No, sincerely, I'm gonna throw u -'
The words broke off in my mouth and I forgot all about the smelly
garbage cans. Chris had unslung his pack and opened it and reached inside.
Now he was holding out a huge pistol with dark wood grips.
'You wanna be the Lone Ranger or the Cisco Kid?' Chris asked, grinning.
'Walking, talking Jesus! Where'd you get that?'
'Hawked it out of my dad's bureau. It's a.45.'
'Yeah, I can see that,' I said, although it could have been a.38 or a.357 for
all I knew-in spite of all the John D MacDonalds and Ed McBains I'd read,
the only pistol I'd ever seen up close was the one Constable Bannerman
carried and although all the kids asked him to take it out of its holster,
Banner never would. 'Man, your dad's gonna hide you when he finds out.
You said he was on a mean streak anyway.'
His eyes just went on dancing. 'That's it, man. He ain't gonna find out
nothing. Him and these other rummies are all laid up down in Harrison with
six or eight bottles of wine. They won't be back for a week. Fucking
rummies.' His lips curled. He was the only guy in our gang who would
never take a drink, even to show he had, you know, big balls. He said he
wasn't going to grow up to be a fucking tosspot like his old man. And he
told me once privately-this was after the DeSpain twins showed up with a
six-pack they'd hawked from their old man and everybody teased Chris
because he wouldn't take a beer or even a swallow-that he was scared to
drink. He said his father never got his nose all the way out of the bottle
anymore, that his older brother had been drunk out of his tits when he raped
that girl, and that Eyeball was always guzzling purple Jesuses with Ace
Merrill and Charlie Hogan and Billy Tessio. What, he asked me, did I think
his chances of letting go of the bottle would be once he picked it up? Maybe
you think that's funny, a twelve-year-old worrying that he might be an
incipient alcoholic, but it wasn't funny to Chris. Not at all. He'd thought
about the possibility a lot. He'd had occasion to.
'You got shells for it?'
'Nine of them-all that was left in the box. He'll think he used 'em himself,
shooting at cans while he was drunk.'
'Is it loaded?'
'No! Chrissake, what do you think I am?'
I finally took the gun. I liked the heavy way it sat there in my hand. I
could see myself as Steve Carella of the 87th precinct, going after that guy
The Heckler or maybe covering Myer Myer or Kling while they broke into
a desperate junkie's sleazy apartment. I sighted on one of the smelly
trashcans and squeezed the trigger. KA-BLAM!
The gun bucked in my hand. Fire licked from the end. It felt as if my
wrist had just been broken. My heart vaulted nimbly into the back of my
mouth and crouched there, trembling. A big hole appeared in the corrugated
metal surface of the trash can-it was the work of an evil conjuror.
'Jesus!' I screamed.
Chris was cackling wildly-in real amusement or hysterical terror I
couldn't tell. 'You did it, you did it! Gordie did it!' He bugled. 'Hey, Gordon
Lachance is shooting up Castle Rock!'
'Shut up! Let's get out of here? I screamed, and grabbed him by the shirt.
As we ran, the back door of the Blue Point jerked open and Francine
Tupper stepped out in her white rayon waitress's uniform. 'Who did that?
Who's letting off cherry-bombs back here?'
We ran like hell, cutting behind the drug store and the hardware store and
the Emporium Galorium, which sold antiques and junk and dime books. We
climbed a fence, spiking our palms with splinters, and finally came out on
Curran Street. I threw the.45 at Chris as we ran; he was killing himself
laughing but caught it and somehow managed to stuff it back into his
knapsack and close one of the snaps. Once around the corner of Curran and
back on Carbine Street, we slowed to a walk so we wouldn't look
suspicious, running in the heat. Chris was still giggling.
'Man, you shoulda seen your face. Oh man, that was priceless. That was
really fine. My fucking-A," He shook his head and slapped his leg and
howled.
'You knew it was loaded, didn't you? You wet end! I'm gonna be in
trouble. That Tupper babe saw me.'
'Shit, she thought it was a firecracker. Besides, ole Thunderjugs Tupper
can't see past the end of her own nose, you know that she thinks wearing
glasses would spoil her pretty face.'
He put one palm against the small of his back and bumped his hips and
got laughing again.
'Well, I don't care. That was a mean trick, Chris. Really.'
'Come on, Gordie.' He put a hand on my shoulder. 'I didn't know it was
loaded, honest to God, I swear on my mother's name. I just took it out of
my dad's bureau. He always unloads it. He must have been really drunk
when he put it away the last time.'
'You really didn't load it?'
'No sir.'
'You swear it on your mother's name even if she goes to hell for you
telling a
lie?'
'I swear.' He crossed himself and spat, his face as open and repentant as
any choirboy's.
But when we turned into the vacant lot where our treehouse was and we
saw Vern and Teddy sitting on their bedrolls waiting for us, he started to
laugh again. He told them the whole story and after everybody had had their
yucks, Teddy asked him what Chris thought they needed a pistol for.
'Nothin',' Chris said. 'Except we might see a bear. Something like that.
Besides, it's spooky sleeping out at night in the woods.'
Everybody nodded at that. Chris was the biggest toughest guy in our
gang, and he could always get away with saying things like that. Teddy, on
the other hand, would have gotten his ass ragged off if he even hinted he
was afraid of the dark. 'Did you set your tent up in the field?' Teddy asked
Vern. 'Yeah. And I put two turned-on flashlights in it so it'll look like we're
there after dark.'
'Hot shit!' I said, and clapped Vern on the back. For him, that was real
thinking. He grinned and blushed.
'So let's go,' Teddy said. 'Come on, it's almost twelve already!' Chris got
up and we gathered around him.
'We'll walk across Beeman's field and behind that furniture place by
Sonny's Texaco,' he said. 'Then we'll get on the railroad tracks down by the
dump and just walk across the trestle into Harlow.'
'How far do you think it's gonna be?' Teddy asked.
Chris shrugged. 'Harlow's big. We're gonna be walking at least twenty
miles. That sound right to you, Gordie?'
'Yeah. It might even be thirty.'
'Even if it's thirty we ought to be there by tomorrow afternoon, if no one
goes
pussy.'
'No pussies here,' Teddy said at once. We all looked at each other for a
second. 'Miaoww,' Vern said, and we all laughed.
'Come on, you guys,' Chris said, and shouldered his pack. We walked out
of the vacant lot together, Chris slightly in the lead.
10
By the time we got across Beeman's field and had struggled up the
cindery embankment to the Great Southern and Western Maine tracks, we
had all taken our shirts off and tied them around our waists. We were
sweating like pigs. At the top of the embankment we looked down the
tracks, towards where we'd have to go.
I'll never forget that moment, no matter how old I get. I was the only one
with a watch-a cheap Timex I'd gotten as a premium for selling Cloverine
Brand Salve the year before.
Its hands stood at straight up noon, and the sun beat down on the dry,
shadeless vista before us with savage heat. You could feel it working to get
in under your skull and fry your brains.
Behind us was Castle Rock spread out on the long hill that was known as
Castle View, surrounding its green and shady common. Further down Castle
River you could see the stacks of the woollen mill spewing smoke into a
sky the colour of gunmetal and spewing waste into the water. The Jolly
Furniture Barn was on our left And straight ahead of us the railroad tracks,
bright and heliographing in the sun. They paralleled the Castle River, which
was on our left. To our right was a lot of overgrown scrubland (there's a
motorcycle track there today-they have scrambles every Sunday afternoon
at two p. m.).
An old abandoned water tower stood on the horizon, rusty and somehow
scary.
We stood there for that one noontime moment and then Chris said
impatiently, 'Come on, let's get going.'
We walked beside the tracks in the cinders, kicking up little puffs of
blackish dust at every step. Our socks and sneakers were soon gritty with it.
Vern started singing 'Roll Me Over in the Clover' but soon quit it, which
was a break for our ears. Only Teddy and Chris had brought canteens, and
we were all hitting them pretty hard.
'We could fill all the canteens again at the dump faucet,' I said. 'My dad
told me that's a safe well. It's a hundred and ninety feet deep.'
'Okay,' Chris said, being the tough platoon leader. 'That'll be a good place
to take five, anyway.'
'What about food?' Teddy asked suddenly. 'I bet nobody thought to bring
something to eat I know I didn't'
Chris stopped. 'Shit! I didn't, either. Gordie?' I shook my head, wondering
how I could have been so dumb. 'Vern?'
'Zip,' Vern said. 'Sorry.'
'Well, let's see how much money we got,' I said. I untied my shirt, spread
it on the cinders, and dropped my own sixty-eight cents onto it. The coins
glittered feverishly in the sunlight. Chris had a tattered dollar and two
pennies. Teddy had two quarters and two nickels. Vern had exactly seven
cents.
'Two-thirty-seven,' I said. 'Not bad. There's a store at the end of that little
road that goes to the dump. Somebody'!! have to walk down there and get
some hamburger and some tonics while the others rest.'
'Who?' Vern asked.
'We'll match for it when we get to the dump. Come on.'
I slid all the money into my pants pocket and was just tying my shirt
around my waist again when Chris hollered: 'Train!'
I put my hand out on one of the rails to feel it, even though I could
already hear it. The rail was thrumming crazily; for a moment it was like
holding the train in my hand. 'Paratroops over the side!' Vern bawled, and
leapt halfway down the embankment in one crazy, clownish stride. Vern
was nuts for playing paratroops anyplace the ground was soft- a gravel pit,
a haymow, an embankment like this one. Chris jumped after him. The train
was really loud now, probably headed straight up our side of the river
towards Lewiston. Instead of jumping, Teddy turned in the direction of
which it was coming. His thick glasses glittered in the sun. His long hair
flopped untidily over his brow in sweat-soaked stringers. 'Go on, Teddy,' I
said.
'No, huh-uh, I'm gonna dodge it' He looked at me, his magnified eyes
frantic with excitement. 'A train-dodge, dig it? What's trucks after a fuckin'
train-dodge?'
'You're crazy, man. You want to get killed?'
'Just like the beaches at Normandy!' Teddy yelled, and strode out into the
middle of the tracks. He stood on one of the cross-ties, lightly balanced.
I stood stunned for a moment, unable to believe stupidity of such width
and breadth. Then I grabbed him, dragged him fighting and protesting to the
embankment, and pushed him over. I jumped after him and Teddy caught
me a good one in the guts while I was still in the air. The wind whooshed
out of me, but I was still able to hit him in the sternum with my knee and
knock him flat on his back before he could get all the way up. I landed,
gasping and sprawling, and Teddy grabbed me around the
neck. We went rolling all the way to the bottom of the embankment,
hitting and clawing at each other while Chris and Vern stared at us, stupidly
surprised.
'You little son of a bitch!' Teddy was screaming at me. 'You fucker! Don't
you throw your weight around on me! I'll kill you, you dipshit!'
I was getting my breath back now, and I made it to my feet. I backed
away as Teddy advanced, holding my open hands up to slap away his
punches, half laughing and half scared. Teddy was no one to fool around
with when he went into one of his screaming fits. He'd take on a big kid in
that state, and after the big kid broke both of his arms, he'd bite.
'Teddy, you can dodge anything you want after we see what we're going
to see but' whack on the shoulder as one wildly-swinging fist got past me
'until then no one's supposed to see us, you' whack on the side of the face,
and then we might have had a real fight if Chris and Vern 'stupid wet end!'
hadn't grabbed us and kept us apart. Above us, the train roared by in a
thunder of diesel exhaust and the great heavy clacking of boxcar wheels. A
few cinders bounced down the embankment and the argument was over at
least until we could hear ourselves talk again.
It was only a short freight, and when the caboose had trailed by, Teddy
said: 'I'm gonna kill him. At least give him a fat lip.' He struggled against
Chris, but Chris only grabbed him tighter.
'Calm down, Teddy,' Chris said quietly, and he kept saying it until Teddy
stopped struggling and just stood there, his glasses hanging askew and his
hearing-aid cord dangling limply against his chest on its way down to the
battery, which he had shoved into the pocket of his jeans.
When he was completely still, Chris turned to me and said: 'What the hell
are you fighting with him about, Gordon?'
'He wanted to dodge the train. I figured the engineer would see him and
report it They might send a cop out.'
'Ahhh, he'd be too busy makin' chocolate in his drawers,' Teddy said, but
he didn't seem angry anymore. The storm had passed.
'Gordie was just trying to do the right thing,' Vern said. 'Come on, peace.'
'Peace, you guys,' Chris agreed.
'Yeah, okay,' I said, and held out my hand, palm up. 'Peace, Teddy?'
'I coulda dodged it,' he said to me. 'You know that, Gordie?'
'Yeah,' I said, although the thought turned me cold inside. 'I know it.'
'Okay. Peace, then.'
'Skin it, man,' Chris ordered, and let go of Teddy.
Teddy slapped his hand down on mine hard enough to sting and then
turned it over. I slapped his.
'Fucking pussy Lachance,' Teddy said.
'Meeiowww,' I said.
'Come on, you guys,' Vern said. 'Let's go, okay?'
'Go anywhere you want, but don't go here,' Chris said solemnly, and Vern
drew back as if to hit him.
We got to the dump around one-thirty, and Vern led the way down the
embankment with a Paratroops over the side! We went to the bottom in big
jumps and leaped over the brackish trickle of water oozing listlessly out of
the culvert which pocked out of the cinders. Beyond this small boggy area
was the sandy, trash-littered verge of the dump.
There was a six-foot security fence surrounding it. Every twenty feet
weather-faded signs were posted. They said: CASTLE ROCK DUMP
HOURS 4-8 PM CLOSED MONDAYS TRESPASSING STRICTLY
FORBIDDEN We climbed to the top of the fence, swung over, and jumped
down. Teddy and Vern led the way towards the well, which you tapped with
an old-fashioned pump-the kind from which you had to call the water with
elbow-grease. There was a Crisco can filled with water next to the pump
handle, and the great sin was to forget to leave it filled for the next guy to
come along. The iron handle stuck off at an angle, looking like a one-
winged bird that was trying to fly. It had once been green, but almost all of
the paint had been rubbed off by the thousands of hands that had worked
that handle since 1940. The dump is one of my strongest memories of
Castle Rock. It always reminds me of the surrealist painters when I think of
it-those fellows who were always painting pictures of clockfaces lying
limply in the crotches of trees or Victorian living rooms standing in the
middle of the Sahara or steam engines coming out of fireplaces. To my
child's eye, nothing in the Castle Rock Dump looked as if it really belonged
there. We had entered from the back. If you came from the front, a wide dirt
road came in through the gate, broadened out into a semicircular area that
had been bulldozed as flat as a dirt landing-strip, and then ended abruptly at
the edge of the dumping-pit. The pump (Teddy and Vern were currently
standing there and squabbling about who was going to prime it) was at the
back of this great pit It was maybe eighty feet deep and filled with all the
American things that get empty, wear out, or just don't work anymore.
There was so much stuff that my eyes hurt just looking at it-or maybe it was
your brain that actually hurt, because it could never quite decide what your
eye should stop on. Then your eye would stop, or be stopped, by something
that seemed as out of place as those limp clock-faces or the living room in
the desert. A brass bedstead leaning drunkenly in the sun. A little girl's
dolly looking amazedly between her thighs as she gave birth to stuffing. An
overturned Studebaker automobile with its chrome bullet nose glittering in
the sun like some Buck Rogers missile. One of those giant water bottles
they have in office buildings, transformed by the summer sun into a hot,
blazing sapphire.
There was plenty of wildlife there, too, although it wasn't the kind you
see in the Walt Disney nature films or at those tame zoos where you can pet
the animals. Plump rats, woodchucks grown sleek and lumbering on such
rich chow as rotting hamburger and maggoty vegetables, seagulls by the
thousands, and stalking among the gulls like thoughtful, introspective
ministers, an occasional huge crow. It was also the place where the town's
stray dogs came for a meal when they couldn't find any trashcans to knock
over or any deer to run. They were a miserable, ugly-tempered, mongrel lot;
slat-sided and grinning bitterly, they would attack each other over a
flyblown piece of bologna or a pile of chicken guts fuming in the sun.
But these dogs never attacked Milo Pressman, the dump-keeper, because
Milo was never without Chopper at his heel. Chopper was-at least until
Camber's dog Cujo went rabid twenty years later-the most feared and least
seen dog in Castle Rock. He was the meanest dog for forty miles around (or
so we heard), and ugly enough to stop a striking clock. The kids whispered
legends about Chopper's meanness. Some said he was half German
Shepherd, some said he was mostly Boxer, and a kid from Castle
View with the unfortunate name of Harry Horr claimed that Chopper was
a Doberman Pinscher whose vocal cords had been surgically removed so
you couldn't hear him when he was on the attack. There were other kids
who claimed Chopper was a maniacal Irish Wolfhound and Milo Pressman
fed him a special mixture of Gaines Meal and chicken blood. These same
kids claimed that Milo didn't dare take Chopper out of his shack unless the
dog was hooded like a hunting falcon.
The most common story was that Pressman had trained Chopper not just
to sic but to sic specific parts of the human anatomy. Thus an unfortunate
kid who had illegally scaled the dump fence to pick for illicit treasures
might hear Milo Pressman cry: 'Chopper! Sic! Hand!' And Chopper would
grab that hand and hold on, ripping skin and tendons, powdering bones
between his slavering jaws, until Milo told him to quit. It was rumoured that
Chopper could take an ear, an eye, a foot, or a leg and that a second
offender who was surprised by Milo and the ever-loyal Chopper would hear
the dread cry: 'Chopper! Sic! Pecker!' And that kid would be a soprano for
the rest of his life. Milo himself was more commonly seen and thus more
commonly regarded. He was just a half-bright working joe who
supplemented his small town salary by fixing things people threw away and
selling them around town. There was no sign of either Milo or Chopper
today.
Chris and I watched Vern prime the pump while Teddy worked the
handle frantically. At last he was rewarded with a flood of clear water. A
moment later both of them had their heads under the trough, Teddy still
pumping away a mile a minute. 'Teddy's crazy,' I said softly.
'Oh yeah,' Chris said matter-of-factly. 'He won't live to be twice the age
he is now, I bet. His dad burnin' his ears like that. That's what did it. He's
crazy to dodge trucks the way he does. He can't see worth a shit, glasses or
no glasses.'
'You remember that time in the tree?'
'Yeah.'
The year before, Teddy and Chris had been climbing the big pine tree
behind my house. They were almost to the top and Chris said they couldn't
go any further because all of the branches up there were rotten. Teddy got
that crazy stubborn look on his face and said fuck that, he had pine tar all
over his hands and he was gonna go up until he could touch the top.
Nothing Chris said could talk him out of it. So up he went, and he actually
made it-he only weighed seventy-five pounds or so, remember. He stood
there, clutching the top of the pine in one tar-gummy hand, shouting that he
was king of the world or some stupid thing like that, and then there was a
sickening, rotted crack as the branch he was standing on gave way and he
plummeted. What happened next was one of those things that makes you
sure there must be a God. Chris reached out, purely on reflex, and what he
caught was a fistful of Teddy Duchamp's hair. And although his wrist
swelled up fat and he was unable to use his right hand very well for almost
two weeks, Chris held him until Teddy, screaming and cursing, got his foot
on a live branch thick enough to support his weight. Except for Chris's blind
grab, he would have turned and crashed and smashed all the way to the foot
of the tree, a hundred and twenty feet below. When they got down, Chris
was grey-faced and almost puking with the fear reaction. And Teddy
wanted to fight him for pulling his hair. They would have gone at it, too, if I
hadn't been there to make peace.
'I dream about that every now and then,' Chris said, and looked at me
with strangely defenceless eyes. 'Except in this dream I have, I always miss
him. I just get a couple of hairs and Teddy screams and down he goes.
Weird, huh?'
'Weird,' I agreed, and for just one moment we looked in each other's eyes
and saw some of the true things that made us friends. Then we looked away
again and watched Teddy and Vern throwing water at each other, screaming
and laughing and calling each other pussies.
'Yeah, but you didn't miss him,' I said. 'Chris Chambers never misses, am
I
right?'
'Not even when the ladies leave the seat down,' he said. He winked at me,
formed an O with his thumb and forefinger, and spat a neat white bullet
through it.
'Eat me raw, Chambers,' I said.
'Through a Flavour Straw,' he said, and we grinned at each other.
Vern yelled: 'Come on and get your water before it runs back down the
piper.'
'Race you,' Chris said.
'In this heat? You're off your gourd.'
'Come on,' he said, still grinning. 'On my go.'
'Okay.'
'Go!'
We raced, our sneakers digging up the hard, sunbaked dirt, our torsos
leaning out ahead of our flying bluejeaned legs, our fists doubled. It was a
dead heat, with both Vern on Chris's side and Teddy on mine holding up
their middle fingers at the same moment. We collapsed laughing in the still,
smoky odour of the place, and Chris tossed Vern his canteen. When I was
full, Chris and I went to the pump and first Chris pumped for me and then I
pumped for him, the shockingly cold water sluicing off the soot and the heat
all in a flash, sending our suddenly freezing scalps four months ahead into
January. Then I refilled the lard can and we all walked over to sit down in
the shade of the dump's only tree, a stunted ash forty feet from Milo
Pressman's tarpaper shack. The tree was hunched slightly to the west, as if
what it really wanted to do was pick up its roots the way an old lady would
pick up her skirts and just get the hell out of the dump.
'The most!' Chris said, laughing, tossing his tangled hair back from his
brow.
'A blast,' I said, nodding, still laughing myself.
'This is really a good time,' Vern said simply, and he didn't just mean
being off-limits inside the dump, or fudging our folks, or going on a hike up
the railroad tracks into Harlow; he meant those things but it seems to me
now that there was more, and that we all knew it. Everything was there and
around us. We knew exactly who we were and exactly where we were
going. It was grand.
We sat under the tree for a while, shooting the shit like we always did-
who had the best ballteam (still the Yankees with Mantle and Maris, of
course), what was the best car ('55 Thunderbird, with Teddy holding out
stubbornly for the '58 Corvette), who was the toughest guy in Castle Rock
who wasn't in our gang (we all agreed it was Jamie Gallant, who gave Mrs.
Ewing the finger and then sauntered out of her class with his hands in his
pockets while she shouted at him), the best TV show (either The
Untouchables or Peter Gunn-both Robert Stack as Eliot Ness and Craig
Stevens as Gunn were cool), all that stuff.
It was Teddy who first noticed that the shade of the ash tree was getting
longer and asked me what time it was. I looked at my watch and was
surprised to see it was quarter past two.
'Hey, man,' Vern said. 'Somebody's got to go for provisions. Dump opens
at four. I don't want to still be here when Milo and Chopper make the
scene.'
Even Teddy agreed. He wasn't afraid of Milo, who had a pot belly and
was at least forty, but every kid in Castle Rock squeezed his balls between
his legs when Chopper's name was mentioned.
'Okay,' I said. 'Odd man goes?'
That's you, Gordie,' Chris said, smiling. 'Odd as a cod.'
'So's your mother,' I said, and gave them each a coin. 'Flip.'
Four coins glittered up into the sun. Four hands snatched them from the
air. Four flat smacks on four grimy wrists. We uncovered. Two heads and
two tails. We flipped again and this time all four of us had tails.
'Oh Jesus, that's a goocher,' Vern said, not telling us anything we didn't
know. Four heads, or a moon, was supposed to be extraordinarily good
luck. Four tails was a goocher, and that meant very bad luck.
'Fuck that shit,' Chris said. 'It doesn't mean anything. Go again.'
'No, man,' Vern said earnestly. 'A goocher, that's really bad. You
remember when Clint Bracken and those guys got wiped out on Sirois Hill
in Durham? Billy tole me they was flippin' for beers and they came up a
goocher just before they got into the car. And bang! They all get fuckin'
totalled. I don't like that. Sincerely.'
'Nobody believes that crap about moons and goochers,' Teddy said
impatiently. 'It's baby stuff, Vern. You gonna flip or not?'
Vern flipped, but with obvious reluctance. This time he, Chris and Teddy
all had tails. I was showing Thomas Jefferson on a nickle. And I was
suddenly scared. It was as if a shadow had crossed some inner sun. They
still had a goocher, the three of them, as if dumb fate had pointed at them a
second time. Abruptly I thought of Chris saying: I just get a couple of hairs
and Teddy screams and down he goes. Weird, huh?
Three tails, one head.
Then Teddy was laughing his crazy, cackling laugh and pointing at me
and the feeling was gone.
'I heard that only fairies laugh like that,' I said, and gave him the finger.
'Eeee-eeee-eeee, Gordie,' Teddy laughed. 'Go get the provisions, you
fuckin' morphadite.'
I wasn't really sorry to be going. I was rested up and didn't mind going
down the road to the Florida Market.
'Don't call me any of your mother's pet names,' I said to Teddy.
'Eeee-eee-eeee, what a fuckin' wet you are, Lachance.'
'Go on, Gordie,' Chris said. 'We'll wait over by the tracks.'
'You guys better not go without me,' I said.
Vern laughed. 'Goin' without you'd be like goin' with Schlitz instead of
Budweiser's, Gordie.'
'Ah, shut up.'
They chanted together: 'I don't shut up, I grow up. And when I look at
you I throw up.'
'Then your mother goes around the corner and licks it up,' I said, and
hauled ass out of there, giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went. I
never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus,
did you?
Different strokes for different folks, they say now, and that's cool. So if I
say summer to you, you get one set of private, personal images that are all
the way different from mine. That's cool. But for me, summer is always
going to mean running down the road to the Florida Market with change
jingling in my pockets, the temperature in the gay nineties, my feet dressed
in Keds. The word conjures an image of the GS&WM railroad tracks
running into a perspective-point in the distance, burnished so white under
the sun that when you closed your eyes you could still see them there in the
dark, only blue instead of white.
But there was more to that summer than our trip across the river to look
for Ray Brower, although that looms the largest. Sounds of The Fleetwoods
singing 'Come Softly Darling' and Robin Luke singing 'Susie Darlin' and
Little Anthony popping the vocal on 'I Ran All the Way Home'. Were they
all hits in that summer of 1960? Yes and no. Mostly yes. In the long purple
evenings when rock and roll from WLAM blurred into night baseball from
WCCU, time shifted. I think it was all 1960 and that the summer went on
for a space of years, held magically intact in a web of sounds: the sweet
hum of crickets, the machine-gun roar of playing-cards riffling against the
spokes of some kid's bicycle as he pedalled home for a late supper of cold
cuts and iced tea, the flat Texas voice of Buddy Knox singing 'Come along
and be my party doll, and I'll make love to you, to you,' and the baseball
announcer's voice mingling with the song and with the smell of freshly cut
grass: 'Count's three and two now. Whitey Ford leans over shakes off the
sign now he's got it Ford pauses pitches and there it goes! Williams
got all of that one! Kiss it goodbye! RED SOX LEAD, THREE TO ONE!'
Was Ted Williams still playing for the Red Sox in 1960? Absolutely not.
But he was. I remember that he was very clearly. Baseball had become
important to me in the last couple of years, ever since I'd had to face the
knowledge that baseball players were as much flesh and blood as I was. The
knowledge came when Roy Campanella's car overturned and the papers
screamed mortal news from the front pages: his career was done, he was
going to sit in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. How that came back to
me, with that same sickening mortal thud, when I sat down to this
typewriter one morning two years ago, turned on the radio, and heard that
Thurman Munson had died while trying to land his airplane. There were
movies to go see at the Gem, which has long since been torn down; science
fiction movies like Gog with Richard Egan and westerns with Audie
Murphy (Teddy saw every movie Audie Murphy made at least three times;
he believed Murphy was almost a god) and war movies with John Wayne.
There were games and endless bolted meals, lawns to mow, places to run to,
walls to pitch pennies against, people to clap you on the back. And now I sit
here trying to look through an IBM keyboard and see that time, trying to
recall the best and worst of that green and brown summer, and I can almost
feel the skinny, scabbed boy still buried in this advancing body and hear
those sounds. But the apotheosis of the memory and the time is Gordon
Lachance running down the road to the Florida Market with change in his
pockets and sweat running down his back. I asked for three pounds of
hamburger and got some hamburger rolls, four bottles of Coke and a two-
cent churchkey to open them with. The owner, a man named George
Dusset, got the meat and then leaned by his cash register, one hammy hand
planted on the counter by the big bottle of hardcooked eggs, a toothpick in
his mouth, his huge beer belly rounding his white T-shirt like a sail filled
with a good wind. He stood right there as I shopped, making sure I didn't
try to hawk anything. He didn't say a word until he was weighing up the
hamburger.
'I know you. You're Denny Lachance's brother. Ain't you?' The toothpick
journeyed from one corner of his mouth to the other, as if on ball bearings.
He reached behind the cash register, picked up a bottle of S'OK cream soda,
and chugged it.
'Yes, sir. But Denny, he -'
'Yeah, I know. That's a sad thing, kid. The Bible says: "In the midst of
life, we are in death." Did you know that Yuh. I lost a brother in Korea.
You look just like Denny, people ever tell you that? Yuh. Spitting image.'
'Yes, sir, sometimes,' I said glumly.
'I remember the year he was All Conference. Halfback, he played. Yuh.
Could he run? Father God and Sonny Jesus! You're probably too young to
remember.' He was looking over my head, out through the screen door and
into the blasting heat, as if he were having a beautiful vision of my brother.
'I remember. Uh, Mr. Dusset?'
'What, kid?' His eyes were still misty with memory; the toothpick
trembled a little between his lips.
'Your thumb is on that scales.'
'What?' He looked down, astounded, to where the ball of his thumb was
pressed firmly on the white enamel. If I hadn't moved away from him a
little bit when he started talking about Dennis, the ground meat would have
hidden it. 'Why, so it is. Yuh. I guess I just got thinkin' about your brother,
God love him.' George Dusset signed a cross on himself.
When he took his thumb off the scales, the needle sprang back six
ounces. He patted a little more meat on top and then did the package up
with white butcher's paper.
'Okay,' he said past the toothpick. 'Let's see what we got here. Three
pounds of hamburg, that's a dollar forty-four. Hamburg rolls, that's twenty-
seven. Four tonics, forty cents. One churchkey, two pence. Come to' He
added it up on the bag he was going to put the stuff in. 'Two-twenty-nine.'
'Thirteen,' I said.
He looked up at me very slowly, frowning. 'Huh?'
'Two-thirteen. You added it wrong.'
'Kid, are you-'
'You added it wrong,' I said. 'First you put your thumb on the scales and
then you overcharged on the groceries, Mr Dusset I was gonna throw some
Hostess Twinkies on top of that order but now I guess I won't.' I spanged
two dollars and thirteen cents down on the Schlitz placemat in front of him.
He looked at the money, then at me. The frown was now tremendous, the
lines on his face as deep as fissures. 'What are you, kid?' He said in a low
voice that was ominously confidential. 'Are you some kind of smartass?'
'No, sir,' I said. 'But you ain't gonna jap me and get away with it. What
would your mother say if she knew you was japping little kids?'
He thrust our stuff into the paper bag with quick stiff movements, making
the Coke bottles clink together. He thrust the bag at me roughly, not caring
if I dropped it and broke the tonics or not. His swarthy face was flushed and
dull, the frown now frozen in place. 'Okay, kid. Here you go. Now what you
do is you get the Christ out of my store. I see you in here again and I going
to throw you out, me. Yuh. Smartass little sonofawhore.'
'I won't come in again,' I said, walking over to the screen door and
pushing it open. The hot afternoon buzzed somnolently along its appointed
course outside, sounding green and brown and full of silent light. 'Neither
will none of my friends. I guess I got fifty or so.'
'Your brother wasn't no smartass!' George Dusset yelled.
'Fuck you!' I yelled, and ran like hell down the road.
I heard the screen door bang open like a gunshot and his bull roar came
after me: 'If you ever come in here again I'll fat your lip for you, you little
punk!' I ran until I was over the first hill, scared and laughing to myself, my
heart beating out a triphammer pulse in my chest. Then I slowed to a fast
walk, looking back over my shoulder every now and then to make sure he
wasn't going to take after me in his car, or anything.
He didn't, and pretty soon I got to the dump gate. I put the bag inside my
shirt, climbed the gate, and monkeyed down the other side. I was halfway
across the dump area when I saw something I didn't like-Milo Pressman's
portholed '56 Buick was parked behind his tarpaper shack. If Milo saw me,
I was going to be in a world of hurt. As yet there was no sign of either him
or the infamous Chopper, but all at once the chain-link fence at the back of
the dump seemed very far away. I found myself wishing I'd gone around the
outside, but I was now too far into the dump to want to turn around and go
back. If Milo saw me climbing the dump fence, I'd probably be in dutch
when I got home, but that didn't scare me as much as Milo yelling for
Chopper to sic would.
Scary violin music started to play in my head. I kept putting one foot in
front of the other, trying to look casual, trying to look as if I belonged here
with a paper grocery sack poking out of my shirt, heading for the fence
between the dump and the railroad tracks.
I was about fifty feet from the fence and just beginning to think that
everything was going to be all right after all when I heard Milo shout. 'Hey!
Hey, you! Kid! Get away from that fence! Get outta here!'
The smart thing to have done would have been to just agree with the guy
and go around, but then I was so keyed up that instead of doing the smart
thing I just broke for the fence with a wild yell, my sneakers kicking up
dust. Vern, Teddy, and Chris came out of the underbrush on the other side of
the fence and stared anxiously through the chain-link.
'You come back here!' Milo bawled. 'Come back here or I'll sic my dawg
on you, goddammit!' I did not exactly find that to be the voice of sanity and
conciliation, and I ran even faster for the fence, my arms pumping, the
brown grocery bag crackling against my skin. Teddy started to laugh his
idiotic chortling laugh, eee-eee-eeee into the air like some reed instrument
being played by a lunatic.
'Go, Gordie! Go!' Vern screamed.
And Milo yelled: 'Sic 'im, Chopper! Go get 'im, boy!'
I threw the bag over the fence and Vern elbowed Teddy out of the way to
catch it. Behind me I could hear Chopper coming, shaking the earth,
blurting fire out of one distended nostril and ice out of the other, dripping
sulphur from his champing jaws. I threw myself halfway up the fence with
one leap, screaming. I made it to the top in no more than three seconds and
simply leaped. I never thought about it, never even looked down to see what
I might land on. What I almost landed on was Teddy, who was doubled over
and laughing like crazy. His glasses had fallen off and tears were streaming
out of his eyes. I missed him by inches and hit the clay-gravel embankment
just to his left. At the same instant, Chopper hit the chain-link fence behind
me and let out a howl of mingled pain and disappointment. I turned around,
holding one skinned knee, and got my first look at the famous Chopper-
and my first lesson in the vast differences between myth and reality.
Instead of some huge hellhound with red, savage eyes and teeth jutting
out of his mouth like straight-pipes from a hotrod, I was looking at a
medium-sized mongrel dog that was a perfectly common black and white.
He was yapping and jumping fruitlessly, going up on his back legs to paw
the fence.
Teddy was now strutting up and down in front of the fence, twiddling his
glasses in one hand, and inciting Chopper to even greater rage.
'Kiss my ass, Choppie!' Teddy invited, spittle flying from his lips. 'Kiss
my ass! Bite shit!'
He bumped his fanny against the chain-link fence and Chopper did his
level best to take Teddy up on his invitation. He got nothing for his pains
but a good healthy nose-bump.
He began to bark crazily, foam flying from his snout. Teddy kept
bumping his rump against the fence and Chopper kept lunging at it, always
missing, doing nothing but racking out his nose, which was now bleeding.
Teddy kept exhorting him, calling him by the somehow grisly diminutive
'Choppie', and Chris and Vern were lying weakly on the embankment,
laughing so hard that they could now do little more than wheeze.
And here came Milo Pressman, dressed in sweat-stained fatigues and a
New York Giants baseball cap, his mouth drawn down in distracted anger.
'Here, here!' He was yelling. 'You boys stop a-teasing that dawg! You
hear me? Stop it right now!'
'Bite it, Choppie!' Teddy yelled, strutting up and down on our side of the
fence like a mad Prussian reviewing his troops. 'Come on and sic me! Sic
me!''
Chopper went nuts. I mean it sincerely. He ran around in a big circle,
yelping and barking and foaming, rear feet spewing up tough little dry
clods. He went around about three times, getting his courage up, I guess,
and then he lauched himself straight at the security fence. He must have
been going thirty miles an hour when he hit it, I kid you not-his doggy lips
were stretched back from his teeth and his ears were flying in the
slipstream.
The whole fence made a low, musical sound as the chain-link was not
just driven back against the posts but sort of stretched back. It was like a
zither note -yimmmmmmm. A strangled yawp came out of Chopper's
mouth, both eyes came up blank, and he did a totally amazing reverse snap-
roll, landing on his back with a solid thump that sent dust puffing up around
him. He just lay there for a moment and then he crawled off with his tongue
hanging crookedly from the left side of his mouth.
At this, Milo himself went almost berserk with rage. His complexion
darkened to a scary plum colour-even his scalp was purple under the short
hedgehog bristles of his flattop haircut. Sitting stunned in the dirt, both
knees of my jeans torn out, my heart still thudding from the nearness of my
escape, I thought that Milo looked like a human version of Chopper.
'I know you!' Milo raved. 'You're Teddy Duchamp! I know all of you!
Sonny, I'll beat your ass, teasing my dawg like that!'
'Like to see you try!' Teddy raved right back. 'Let's see you climb over
this fence and get me, fatass!'
'WHAT? WHAT DID YOU CALL ME?'
'FAT-ASS!' Teddy screamed happily. 'LARD-BUCKET! TUBBAGUTS!
COME ON! COME 0N!' He was jumping up and down, fists clenched,
sweat flying
from his hair. 'TEACH YOU TO SIC YOUR STUPID DOG ON
PEOPLE! COME ON! LIKE TO SEE YOU TRY!'
'You little tin-weasel pecker wood loony's son! I'll see your mother gets
an invitation to go down and talk to the judge in court about what you done
to my dawg!'
'What did you call me?' Teddy asked hoarsely. He had stopped jumping
up and down. His eyes had gone huge and glassy, and his skin was the
colour of lead.
Milo had called Teddy a lot of things, but he was able to go back and get
the one that had struck home with no trouble at all-since then I have noticed
again and again what a genius people have for that for finding the
LOONY button down side and not just pressing it but hammering on the
fucker.
'Your dad was a loony,' he said, grinning. 'Loony up in Togus, that's what.
Crazier'n a shithouse rat. Crazier'n a buck with tickwood fever. Nuttier'n a
long-tailed cat in a room fulla rockin' chairs. Loony. No wonder you're
actin' the way you are, with a loony for a f-'
'YOUR MOTHER BLOWS DEAD RATS!' Teddy screamed. 'AND IF
YOU CALL MY DAD A LOONY AGAIN, I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU,
YOU COCKSUCKER!'
'Loony,' Milo said smugly. He'd found the button, all right. 'Loony's kid,
loony's kid, your father's got toys in the attic, kid, tough break.'
Vern and Chris had been getting over their laughing fit, perhaps getting
ready to appreciate the seriousness of the situation and call Teddy off, but
when Teddy told Milo that his mother blew dead rats, they went back into
hysterics again, lying there on the bank, rolling from side to side, their feet
kicking, holding their bellies. 'No more,' Chris said weakly. 'No more,
please, no more, I swear to God I'm gonna bust!'
Chopper was walking around in a large, dazed figure-eight behind Milo.
He looked like the losing fighter about ten seconds after the ref has ended
the match and awarded the winner a TKO. Meanwhile, Teddy and Milo
continued their discussion of Teddy's father, standing nose to nose, with the
wire fence Milo was too old and too fat to climb between them.
'Don't you say nothing else about my dad! My dad stormed the beaches at
Normandy, you fucking wet end!'
'Yeah, well, where is he now, you ugly little four-eyed turd? He's up to
Togus, ain't he? He's up to Togus because HE WENT FUCKING SECTION
EIGHT!'
'Okay, that's it,' Teddy said. 'That's it, that's the end, I'm gonna kill you.'
He threw himself at the fence and started up.
'You come on and try it, you slimy little bastard.' Milo stood back,
grinning and waiting.
'No!' I shouted. I got to my feet, grabbed Teddy by the loose seat of his
jeans, and pulled him off the fence. We both staggered back and fell over,
him on top. He squashed my balls pretty good and I groaned. Nothing hurts
like having your balls squashed, you know it? But I kept my arms locked
around Teddy's middle.
'Lemme up!' Teddy sobbed, writhing in my arms. 'Lemme up, Gordie!
Nobody ranks out my old man. LEMME UP GODDAMMIT LEMME UP!'
'That's just what he wants!' I shouted in his ear. 'He wants to get you over
there and beat the piss out of you and then take you to the cops!'
'Huh?' Teddy craned around to look at me, his face dazed.
'Never mind your smart mouth, kid,' Milo said, advancing to the fence
again with his hands curled into ham-sized fists. 'Let 'im fight his own
battles.'
'Sure,' I said. 'You only outweigh him by five hundred pounds.'
'I know you, too,' Milo said ominously. 'Your name's Lachance.' He
pointed to where Vern and Chris were finally picking themselves up, still
breathing fast from laughing so hard. 'And those guys are Chris Chambers
and one of those stupid Tessio kids. All your fathers are going to get calls
from me, except for the loony up to Togus. You'll go to the 'formatory,
every one of you. Juvenile delinquents!'
He stood flat on his feet, big freckled hands held out like a guy who
wanted to play One Potato Two Potato, breathing hard, eyes narrow, waiting
for us to cry or say we were sorry or maybe give him Teddy so he could
feed Teddy to Chopper.
Chris made an O out of his thumb and index finger and spat neatly
through it.
Vern hummed and looked to the sky.
Teddy said, 'Come on, Gordie. Let's get away from this asshole before I
puke.'
'Oh, you're gonna get it, you foulmouthed little whoremaster. Wait'll I get
you to the constable.'
'We heard what you said about his father,' I told him. 'We're all witnesses.
And you sicced that dog on me. That's against the law.'
Milo looked a trifle uneasy. 'You was trespassin'.'
'The hell I was. The dump's public property.'
'You climbed the fence.'
'Sure I did, after you sicced your dog on me,' I said, hoping that Milo
wouldn't recall that I'd also climbed the gate to get in.' What'd you think I
was gonna do? Stand there and et 'im rip me to pieces? Come on, you guys.
Let's go. It stinks around here.'
"Formatory,' Milo promised hoarsely, his voice shaking. 'Formatory for
you wiseguys.'
'Can't wait to tell the cops how you called a war vet a fuckin' loony,'
Chris called back over his shoulder as we moved away. 'What did you do in
the war, Mr Pressman?'
'NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESSr Milo shrieked. 'YOU HURT
MY DAWG!'
'Put it on your t. s. slip and send it to the chaplain,' Vern muttered, and
then we were climbing the railroad embankment again.
'Come back here!' Milo shouted, but his voice was fainter now and he
seemed to be losing interest.
Teddy shot him the finger as we walked away. I looked back over my
shoulder when we got to the top of the embankment. Milo was standing
there behind the security fence, a big man in a baseball cap with his dog
sitting beside him. His fingers were hooked through the small chain-link
diamonds as he shouted at us, and all at once I felt sorry for him-he looked
like the biggest third-grader in the world, locked inside the playground by
mistake, yelling for someone to let him out. He kept yelling for a while and
then he either gave up or we got out of range. No more was seen or heard of
Milo Pressman and Chopper that day.
13
There was some discussion-in righteous tones that were actually kind of
forced-sounding-about how we had shown that creepy Milo Pressman we
weren't just another bunch of pussies. I told how the guy at the Florida
Market had tried to jap us,
and then we fell into a gloomy silence, thinking it over. For my part, I
was thinking that maybe there was something to that stupid goocher
business after all. Things couldn't have turned out much worse-in fact, I
thought, it might be better to just keep going and spare my folks the pain of
having one son in the Castle View Cemetery and one in South Windham
Boys' Correctional. I had no doubt that Milo would go to the cops as soon
as the importance of the dump having been closed at the time of the
incident filtered into his thick skull. When that happened, he would realize
that I really had been trespassing, public property or not. Probably that gave
him every right in the world to sic his stupid dog on me. And while
Chopper wasn't the hellhound he was cracked up to be, he sure would have
ripped the sitdown out of my jeans if I hadn't won the race to the fence. All
of it put a big dark crimp in the day. And there was another gloomy idea
rolling around inside my head-the idea that this was no lark after all, and
maybe we deserved our bad luck. Maybe it was even God warning us to go
home. What were we doing, anyway, going to look at some kid that had
gotten himself all mashed up by a freight train?
But we were doing it, and none of us wanted to stop.
We had almost reached the trestle which carried the tracks across the
river when Teddy burst into tears. It was as if a great inner tidal wave had
broken through a carefully constructed set of mental dykes. No bullshit-it
was that sudden and that fierce. The sobs doubled him over like punches
and he sort of collapsed into a heap, his hands going from his stomach to
the mutilated gobs of flesh that were the remains of his ears. He went on
crying in hard, violent bursts. None of us knew what the fuck to do. It
wasn't crying like when you got hit by a line drive while you were playing
shortstop or smashed on the head playing tackle football on the common or
when you fell off your bike. There was nothing physically wrong with him.
We walked away a little and watched him, our hands in our pockets.
'Hey, man' Vern said in a very thin voice. Chris and I looked at Vern
hopefully. 'Hey, man' was always a good start. But Vern couldn't follow it
up.
Teddy leaned forward onto the crossties and put a hand over his eyes.
Now he looked like he was doing the Allah bit -'Salami, salami, baloney,' as
Popeye says. Except it wasn't funny.
At last, when the force of his crying had trailed off a little, it was Chris
who went to him.
He was the toughest guy in our gang (maybe even tougher than Jamie
Gallant, I thought privately), but he was also the guy who made the best
peace. He had a way about it. I'd seen him sit down on the curb next to a
little kid with a scraped knee, a kid he didn't even fucking know, and get
him talking about something-the Shrine Circus that was coming to town or
Huckleberry Hound on TV-until the kid forgot he was supposed to be hurt.
Chris was good at it. He was tough enough to be good at it.
'Listen, Teddy, what do you care what a fat old pile of shit like him said
about your father? Huh? I mean, sincerely! That don't change nothing, does
it? What a fat old pile of shit like him says? Huh? Huh? Does it?'
Teddy shook his head violently. It changed nothing. But to hear it spoken
of in bright daylight, something must have gone over and over in his mind
while he was lying awake in bed and looking at the moon off centre in one
windowpane, something he must have thought about in his slow and broken
way until it seemed almost holy, trying to make sense out of it, and then to
have it brought home to him that everybody else had merely dismissed his
dad as a loony that had rocked him. But it changed nothing. Nothing.
'He still stormed the beaches at Normandy, right?' Chris said. He picked
up one of Teddy's sweaty, grimy hands and patted it.
Teddy nodded fiercely, crying. Snot was running out of his nose.
'Do you think that pile of shit was at Normandy?'
Teddy shook his head violently. 'Nuh-Nuh-No?'
'Do you think that guy knows you?'
'Nuh-No! No, b-b-but-'
'Or your father? He one of your father's buddies?'
'NO!' Angry, horrified at the thought. Teddy's chest heaved and more
sobs came out of it.
He had pushed his hair away from his ears and I could see the round
brown plastic button of the hearing aid set in the middle of the right one.
The shape of the hearing aid made more sense than the shape of his ear, if
you get what I mean.
Chris said calmly, 'Talk is cheap.'
Teddy nodded, still not looking up.
'And whatever's between you and your old man, talk can't change that.'
Teddy's head shook without definition, unsure if this was true. Someone
had redefined his pain, and redefined it in shockingly common terms. That
would (loony) have to be examined (fucking section eight) later. In depth.
On long sleepless nights.
Chris rocked him. 'He was rankin' you, man,' he said in soothing
cadences that were almost a lullabye. 'He was just tryin' to rank you over
that friggin' fence, you know it? No strain, man. No fuckin' strain. He don't
know nothing about your old man. He don't know nothin' but stuff he heard
from those rumdums down at the Mellow Tiger. He's just dogshit, man.
Right, Teddy? Huh? Right?'
Teddy's crying was down to sniffles. He wiped his eyes, saving two sooty
rings around them, and sat up.
'I'm okay,' he said, and the sound of his own voice seemed to convince
him. 'Yeah, I'm okay." He stood up and put his glasses back on-dressing his
naked face, it seemed to me.
He laughed thinly and swiped his bare arm across the snot on his upper
lip. 'Fuckin' crybaby, right?'
'No, man,' Vern said uncomfortably. 'If anyone was rankin' out my dad -'
'Then you got to kill 'em!' Teddy said briskly, almost arrogantly. 'Kill
their asses. Right, Chris?'
'Right,' Chris said amiably, and clapped Teddy on the back.
'Right, Gordie?'
'Absolutely,' I said, wondering how Teddy could care so much for his dad
when his dad had practically killed him, and how I couldn't seem to give
much of a shit one way or the other about my own dad, when so far as I
could remember, he had never laid a hand on me since I was three and got
some bleach from under the sink and started to eat it.
We walked another two hundred yards down the tracks and Teddy said in
a quieter voice: 'Hey, if I spoiled your good time, I'm sorry. I guess that was
pretty stupid shit back there at that fence.'
'I ain't sure I want it to be no good time,' Vern said suddenly.
Chris looked at him. 'You sayin' you want to go back, man?'
'No, huh-uh!' Vern's face knotted in thought. 'But goin' to see a dead kid
it shouldn't be a party, maybe. I mean, if you can dig it. I mean' He looked
at us rather wildly. 'I mean, I could be a little scared. If you get me.'
Nobody said anything and Vern plunged on: 'I mean, sometimes I get
nightmares. Like aw, you guys remember the time Danny Naughton left
that pile of old funnybooks, the ones with the vampires and people getting
cut up and all that shit? Jeezum-crow, I'd wake up in the middle of the night
dreamin' about some guy hangin' in a house with his face all green or
somethin', you know, like that, and it seems like there's somethin' under the
bed and if I dangled a hand over the side, that thing might, you know, grab
me '
We all began to nod. We knew about the night-sweats. I would have
laughed then, though, if you had told me that one day not too many years
from then, I'd parley a simple case of the night-sweats into about a million
dollars.
'And I don't dare say anything because my friggin' brother well, you
know Billy he'd broadcast it' He shrugged miserably. 'So I'm ascared to
look at that kid 'cause if he's, you know, if he's really bad'
I swallowed and glanced at Chris. He was looking gravely at Vern and
nodding for him to go on.
'If he's really bad,' Vern resumed, 'I'll have nightmares about him and
wake up thinkin' it's him under my bed, all cut up in a pool of blood like he
just came out of one of those Saladmaster gadgets they show on TV, just
eyeballs and hair, but movin' somehow, if you can dig that, movin'
somehow, you know, and gettin' ready to grab -'
'Jesus Christ,' Teddy said thickly. 'What a fuckin' bedtime story.'
'Well I can't help it,' Vern said, his voice defensive. 'But I feel like we
hafta see him, even if there are bad dreams. You know? Like we hafta. But
but maybe it shouldn't be no good time.'
'Yeah,' Chris said softly. 'Maybe it shouldn't.'
Vern said pleadingly: 'You won't tell none of the other guys, will you? I
don't mean about the nightmares, everybody has those- I mean about wakin'
up and thinkin' there might be somethin' under the bed. I'm too fuckin' old
for the boogeyman.'
We all said we wouldn't tell, and a glum silence fell over us again. It was
only quarter to three, but it felt much later. It was too hot and too much had
happened. We weren't even over into Harlow yet. We were going to have to
pick them up and lay them down if we were going to make some real miles
before dark.
We passed the railroad junction and a signal on a tall, rusty pole and all
of us paused to chuck cinders at the steel flag on top, but nobody hit it. And
around three-thirty we came to the Castle River and the GS&WM trestle
which crossed it.
14
The river was better than a hundred yards across at that point in 1960;
I've been back to look at it since then, and found it had narrowed up quite a
bit during the years between. They're always fooling with the river, trying to
make it work better for the mills, and they've put in so many dams that it's
pretty well tamed. But in those days there were only three dams on the
whole length of the river as it ran across all of New Hampshire and half of
Maine. The Castle was still pretty free back then, and every third spring it
would overflow its banks and cover Route 136 in either Harlow or Danvers
Junction or both.
Now, at the end of the driest summer western Maine had seen since the
depression, it was still broad. From where we stood on the Castle Rock
side, the bulking forest on the Harlow side looked like a different country
altogether. The pines and spruces over there were bluish in the heat-haze of
the afternoon. The rails went across the water fifty feet up, supported by an
underpinning of tarred wooden support posts and crisscrossing beams.
The water was so shallow you could look down and see the tops of the
cement plugs which had been planted ten feet deep in the riverbed to hold
up the trestle.
The trestle itself was pretty chintzy-the rails ran over a long, narrow
wooden platform of six-by-fours. There was a four-inch gap between each
pair of these beams where you could look all the way down into the water.
On the sides, there was no more than eighteen inches between the rail and
the edge of the trestle. If a train came it was maybe enough room to avoid
getting plastered but the wind generated by a highballing freight would
surely sweep you off to fall to a certain death against the rocks just below
the surface of the shallow running water.
Looking at the trestle, we all felt fear start to crawl around in our bellies
and mixing uneasily with the fear was the excitement of a boss dare, a
really big one, something you could brag on for weeks after you got home
if you got home. That queer light was creeping back into Teddy's eyes and I
thought he wasn't seeing the GS&WM train trestle at all but a long sandy
beach, a thousand LSTs aground in the foaming waves, ten thousand GIs
charging up the sand, combat boots digging. They were leaping rolls of
barbed wire! Tossing grenades at pillboxes! Overrunning machine-gun
nests!
We were standing beside the tracks where the cinders sloped away
towards the river's cut-the place where the embankment stopped and the
trestle began. Looking down, I could see where the slope started to get
steep. The cinders gave way to straggly, tough-looking bushes and slabs of
grey rock. Further down there were a few stunted firs with exposed roots
writhing their way out of fissures in the plates of rock; they seemed to be
looking down at their own miserable reflections in the running water.
At this point, the Castle River actually looked fairly clean; at Castle Rock
it was just entering Maine's textile-mill belt. But there were no fish jumping
out there, although the river was clear enough to see the bottom-you had to
go another ten miles upstream and towards New Hampshire before you
could see any fish in the Castle. There were no fish, and along the edges of
the river you could see dirty collars of foam around some of the rocks-the
foam was the colour of old ivory. The river's smell was not particularly
pleasant, either; it smelled like a laundry hamper full of mildewy towels.
Dragonflies stitched at the surface of the water and laid their eggs with
impunity. There were no trout to eat them. Hell, there weren't even any
shiners.
'Man,' Chris said softly.
'Come on,' Teddy said in that brisk, arrogant way. 'Let's go.' He was
already edging his way out, walking on the six-by-fours between the
shining rails.
'Say,' Vern said uneasily, 'any of you guys know when the next train's
due?'
We all shrugged.
I said, 'There's the Route 136 bridge'
'Hey, come on, gimme a break!' Teddy cried. 'That means walkin' five
miles down the river on this side and then five miles back up on the other
side it'll take us until dark! If we use the trestle, we can get to the same
place in ten minutes!'
'But if a train comes, there's nowheres to go,' Vern said. He wasn't
looking at Teddy. He was looking down at the fast, bland river.
'Fuck there isn't!' Teddy said indignantly. He swung over the edge and
held one of the wooden supports between the rails. He hadn't gone out very
far-his sneakers were almost touching the ground-but the thought of doing
that same thing above the middle of the river with a fifty-foot drop beneath
and a train bellowing by just over my head, a train that would probably be
dropping some nice hot sparks into my hair and down the back of my neck
none of that actually made me feel like Queen for a Day.
'See how easy it is?' Teddy said. He dropped to the embankment, dusted
his hands, and climbed back up beside us.
'You tellin' me you're gonna hang on that way if it's a two hundred car
freight?' Chris asked. 'Just sorta hang there by your hands for five or ten
minutes?'
'You chicken?' Teddy shouted.
'No, just askin' what you'd do,' Chris said, grinning. 'Peace, man.'
'Go around if you want to!' Teddy brayed. 'Who gives a fuck? I'll wait for
you! I'll take a nap!'
'One train already went by,' I said reluctantly. 'And there probably isn't
any more than one, two trains a day that go through Harlow. Look at this.' I
kicked the weeds growing up through the railroad ties with one sneaker.
There were no weeds growing between the tracks which ran between Castle
Rock and Lewiston.
'There. See?' Teddy was triumphant.
'But still, there's a chance,' I added.
'Yeah,' Chris said. He was looking only at me, his eyes sparkling. 'Dare
you, Lachance.'
'Dares go first.'
'Okay,' Chris said. He widened his gaze to take in Teddy and Vern. 'Any
pussies here?'
'NO!' Teddy shouted.
Vern cleared his throat, croaked, cleared it again, and said 'no' in a very
small voice. He smiled a weak, sick smile.
'Okay,' Chris said but we hesitated for a moment, even Teddy, looking
warily up and down the tracks. I knelt down and took one of the steel rails
firmly in my hand, never minding that it was almost hot enough to blister
the skin. The rail was mute.
'Okay,' I said, and as I said it some guy pole-vaulted in my stomach. He
dug his pole all the way into my balls, it felt like, and ended up sitting
astride my heart.
We went out onto the trestle single-file: Chris first, then Teddy, then
Vern, and me playing tail-end Charlie because I was the one who said dares
go first. We walked on the platform crossties between the rails, and you had
to look at your feet whether you were scared of heights or not. A misstep
and you would go down to your crotch, probably with a broken ankle to
pay.
The embankment dropped away beneath me, and every step further out
seemed to seal our decision more firmly and to make it feel more
suicidally stupid. I stopped to look up when I saw the rocks giving way to
water far beneath me. Chris and Teddy were a long way ahead, almost out
over the middle, and Vern was tottering slowly along behind them, peering
studiously down at his feet. He looked like an old lady trying out stilts with
his head poked downward, his back hunched, his arms held out for balance.
I looked back over my shoulder. Too far, man, I had to keep going now, and
not only because a train might come. If I went back, I'd be a pussy for life.
So I got walking again. After looking down at that endless series of
crossties for a while, with a glimpse of running water between each pair, I
started to feel dizzy
and disoriented. Each time I brought my foot down, part of my brain
assured me it was going to plunge through into space, even though I could
see it was not.
I became acutely aware of all the noises inside me and outside me, like
some crazy orchestra tuning up to play. The steady thump of my heart, the
bloodbeat in my ears like a drum being played with brushes, the creak of
sinews like the strings of a violin that has been tuned radically upward, the
steady hiss of the river, the hot hum of a locust digging into tight bark, the
monotonous cry of a chickadee, and somewhere, far away, a barking dog.
Chopper, maybe. The mildewy smell of the Castle River was strong in my
nose. The long muscles in my thighs were trembling. I kept thinking how
much safer it would be (probably faster, as well) if I just got down on my
hands and knees and scuttered along that way. But I wouldn't do that-none
of us would. If the Saturday matinee movies down to the Gem had taught us
anything, it was that Only Losers Crawl. It was one of the central tenets of
the Gospel According to Hollywood. Good guys walk firmly upright, and if
your sinews are creaking like overtuned violin strings because of the
adrenalin rush going on in your body, and if the long muscles in your thighs
are trembling for the same reason, why, so be it.
I had to stop in the middle of the trestle and look up at the sky for a
while. That dizzy feeling had been getting worse. I saw phantom crossties-
they seemed to float right in front of my nose. Then they faded out and I
began to feel okay again. I looked ahead and saw I had almost caught up
with Vern, who was slowpoking along worse than ever. Chris and Teddy
were almost all the way across.
And although I've since written seven books about people who can do
such exotic things as read minds and precognit the future, that was when I
had my first and last psychic flash. I'm sure that's what it was; how else to
explain it? I squatted and made a fist around the rail on my left. It
thrummed in my hand. It was thrumming so hard that it was like gripping a
bundle of deadly metallic snakes.
You've heard it said 'His bowels turned to water'? I know what that phrase
means -exactly what it means. It may be the most accurate cliche ever
coined. I've been scared since, badly scared, but I've never been as scared as
I was in that moment, holding that hot live rail. It seemed that for a moment
all my works below throat level just went limp and lay there in an internal
faint. A thin stream of urine ran listlessly down the inside of one thigh. My
mouth opened. I didn't open it, it opened by itself, the jaw dropping like a
trapdoor from which the hingepins had suddenly been moved. My tongue
was plastered suffocatingly against the roof of my mouth. All my muscles
were locked. That was the worst. My works were limp but my muscles were
in a kind of dreadful lockbolt and I couldn't move at all. It was only for a
moment, but in the subjective timestream, it seemed forever.
All sensory input became intensified, as if some power surge had
occurred in the electrical flow of my brain, cranking everything up from a
hundred and ten volts to two-twenty. I could hear a plane passing in the sky
somewhere near and had time to wish I was on it, just sitting in a window
seat with a Coke in my hand and gazing idly down at the shining line of a
river whose name I did not know. I could see every little splinter and gouge
in the tarred crosstie I was squatting on. And out of the corner of my eye I
could see the rail itself with my hand still clutched around it, glittering
insanely. The vibration from that rail sank so deeply into my hand that
when I took it away it still vibrated, the nerve-endings kicking each other
over again and again, tingling the way a hand or a foot tingles when it has
been asleep and is starting to wake up. I could taste my saliva, suddenly all
electric and sour and thickened to curds along my gums. And worst,
somehow most horrible of all, I couldn't hear the train yet, could not know
if it was rushing at me from ahead or behind, or how close it was. It was
invisible. It was unannounced, except for that shaking rail in my hand.
There was only that to advertise its imminent arrival. An image of Ray
Brower, dreadfully mangled and thrown into a ditch somewhere like a
ripped-open laundry bag, reeled before my eyes. We would join him, or at
least Vern and I would, or at least I would. We had invited ourselves to our
own funerals. The last thought broke the paralysis and I shot to my feet. I
probably would have looked like a jack-in-the-box to anyone watching, but
to myself I felt like a boy in underwater slow motion, shooting up not
through five feet of air but rather up through five hundred feet of water,
moving slowly, moving with a dreadful languidness as the water parted
grudgingly.
But at last I did break the surface. I screamed: 'TRAIN!'
The last of the paralysis fell from me and I began to run.
Vern's head jerked back over his shoulder. The surprise that distorted his
face was almost comically exaggerated, written as large as the letters in a
Dick and Jane primer. He saw me break into my clumsy, shambling run,
dancing from one horribly high crosstie to the next, and knew I wasn't
joking. He began to run himself.
Far ahead, I could see Chris stepping off the ties and onto the solid safe
embankment and I hated him with a sudden bright green hate as juicy and
as bitter as the sap in an April leaf. He was safe. That fucker was safe. I
watched him drop to his knees and grab a rail My left foot almost slipped
into the yaw beneath me. I flailed with my arms, my eyes as hot as ball
bearings in some runaway piece of machinery, got my balance, and ran on.
Now I was right behind Vern. We were past the halfway point and for the
first time I heard the train. It was coming from behind us, coming from the
Castle Rock side of the river. It was a low rumbling noise that began to rise
slightly and sort itself into the diesel thrum of the engine and the higher,
more sinister sound of big grooved wheels turning heavily on the rails.
'Awwwwwwww, shit!' Vern screamed. 'Run, you pussy!' I yelled, and
thumped him on the back. 'I can't! I'll fall!'
'Runfaster!'
'A wwwwwwwwwww-SHIT!'
But he ran faster, a shambling scarecrow with a bare, sunburnt back, the
collar of his shirt swinging and dangling below his butt. I could see the
sweat standing out on his peeling shoulderblades, standing out in perfect
little beads. I could see the fine down on the nape of his neck. His muscles
clenched and loosened, clenched and loosened, clenched and loosened. His
spine stood out in a series of knobs, each knob casting its own crescent-
shaped shadow- I could see that these knobs grew closer together as they
approached his neck. He was still holding his bedroll and I was still holding
mine. Vern's feet thudded on the crossties. He almost missed one, lunged
forward with his arms out, and I whacked him on the back again to keep
him going. 'Gordeeee I can't AWWWWWWWWWWW-SHE-EEEEYIT-'
'RUN FASTER, DICKFACE!' I bellowed and was I enjoying this? Yeah-
in some peculiar, self-destructive way that I have experienced since only
when completely and utterly drunk, I was. I was driving Vern Tessio like a
drover getting a particularly fine cow to market. And maybe he was
enjoying his own fear in that same way, bawling like that self-same cow,
hollering and sweating, his ribcage rising and falling like the bellows of a
blacksmith on a speed-trip, clumsily keeping his footing, lurching ahead.
The train was very loud now, its engine deepening to a steady rumble. Its
whistle sounded as it crossed the junction point where we had paused to
chuck cinders at the rail-flag. I had finally gotten my hellhound, like it or
not. I kept waiting for the trestle to start shaking under my feet. When that
happened, it would be right behind us. 'GO FASTER, VERN! FAAASTER!'
'Oh Gawd Gordie oh Gawd Gordie oh Gawd AWWWWWWW-
SHEEEEEEEYIT!' The freight's electric horn suddenly spanked the air into
a hundred pieces with one long loud blast, making everything you ever saw
in a movie or a comic book or one of your own daydreams fly apart, letting
you know what both the heroes and the cowards really heard when death
flew at them: WHHHHHHHONNNNNNK!
WHHHHHHHHHONNNNNNNNK!
And then Chris was below us and to the right, and Teddy was behind
him, his glasses flashing back arcs of sunlight, and they were both
mouthing a single word and the word was jump! but the train had sucked all
the blood out of the word, leaving only its shape in their mouths. The trestle
began to shake as the train charged across it. We jumped. Vern landed full-
length in the dust and the cinders and I landed right beside him, almost on
top of him. I never did see that train, nor do I know if its engineer saw us-
when I mentioned the possibility that he hadn't seen us to Chris a couple of
years later, he said, 'They don't blow the electric horn like that just for
chucks, Gordie.' But he could have; he could have been blowing it just for
the hell of it. I suppose. Right then, such fine points didn't much matter. I
clapped my hands over my ears and dug my face into the hot dirt as the
freight went by, metal squalling against metal, the air buffeting us. I had no
urge to look at it. It was a long freight but I never looked at all. Before it
had passed completely, I felt a warm hand on my neck and knew it was
Chris's.
When it was gone-when I was sure it was gone -I raised my head like a
soldier coming out of his foxhole at the end of a day-long artillery barrage.
Vern was still plastered into the dirt, shivering. Chris was sitting cross-
legged between us, one hand on Vern's sweaty neck, the other still on mine.
When Vern finally sat up, shaking all over and licking his lips
compulsively, Chris said, 'What you guys think if we drink those Cokes?
Could anybody use one besides me?' We all thought we could use one.
15
About a quarter of a mile along on the Harlow side, the GS&WM tracks
plunged directly into the woods. The heavily wooded land sloped down to a
marshy area. It was full of mosquitoes almost as big as fighter-planes, but it
was cool blessedly cool.
We sat down in the shade to drink our Cokes. Vern and I threw our shirts
over our shoulders to keep the bugs off, but Chris and Teddy just sat naked
to the waist, looking as cool and collected as two Eskimos in an icehouse.
We hadn't been there five minutes when Vern had to go off into the bushes
and take a squat, which led to a good deal of joking and elbowing when he
got back.
'Train scare you much, Vern?'
'No,' Vern said. 'I was gonna squat when we got across, anyway. I hadda
take a squat, you know?'
'Verrrrrrrn!' Chris and Teddy chorused.
'Come on, you guys, I did. Sincerely.'
'Then you won't mind if we examine the seat of your Jockeys for
Hershey-squirts, willya?' Teddy asked, and Vern laughed, finally
understanding that he was getting ribbed.
'Go screw.'
Chris turned to me. 'That train scare you, Gordie?'
'Nope,' I said, and sipped my Coke.
'Not much, you sucker.' He punched my arm.
'Sincerely! I wasn't scared at all.'
'Yeah? You wasn't scared?' Teddy was looking me over carefully.
'No. I was fuckin' petrified.'
This slew all of them, even Vern, and we laughed long and hard. Then we
just laid back, not goofing anymore, just drinking our Cokes and being
quiet. My body felt warm, exercised, at peace with itself. Nothing in it was
working crossgrain to anything else. I was alive and glad to be. Everything
seemed to stand out with a special dearness, and although I never could
have said that out loud I didn't think it mattered-maybe that sense of
dearness was something I wanted just for myself.
I think I began to understand a little bit that day what makes men become
daredevils. I paid twenty dollars to watch Evel Knievel attempt his jump
over the Snake River Canyon a couple of years ago and my wife was
horrified. She told me that if I'd been born a Roman I would have been right
there in the Coliseum, munching grapes and watching as the lions
disembowelled the Christians. She was wrong, although it was hard for me
to explain why (and, really, I think she thought I was just jiving her). I
didn't cough up that twenty to watch the man die on coast-to-coast closed-
circuit TV, although I was quite sure that was exactly what was going to
happen. I went because of the shadows that are always somewhere behind
our eyes, because of what Bruce Springsteen calls the darkness on the edge
of town in one of his songs, and at one time or another I think everyone
wants to dare that darkness in spite of the jalopy bodies that some joker of a
God gave us human beings. No not in spite of our jalopy bodies but
because of them.
'Hey, tell that story,' Chris said suddenly, sitting up.
'What story?' I asked, although I guess I knew.
I always felt uncomfortable when the talk turned to my stories, although
all of them seemed to like them-wanting to tell stories, even wanting to
write them down that was just peculiar enough to be boss, like wanting to
grow up to be a sewer inspector or a Grand Prix mechanic. Richie Jenner, a
kid who hung around with us until his family moved to Nebraska in 1959,
was the first one to find out that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, that
I wanted to do that for my full-time job. We were up in my room, just
fooling around, and he found a bunch of handwritten pages under the comic
books in a carton in my closet. What's this! Richie asks. Nothin', I say, and
try to grab them back. Richie held the pages up out of reach I must admit
that I didn't try very hard to get them back. I wanted him to read them and
at the same time I didn't-an uneasy mix of pride and shyness that has never
changed in me very much when someone asks to look. The act of writing
itself is done in secret, like masturbation-oh, I have one friend who has
done things like write stories in the display windows of bookshops and
department stores, but this is a man who is nearly crazy with courage, the
kind of man you'd like to have with you if you just happened to fall down
with a heart attack in a city where no one knew you. For me, it always
wants to be sex and always falls short-it's always that adolescent handjob in
the bathroom with the door locked.
Richie sat right there on the end of my bed for most of the afternoon
reading his way through the stuff I had been doing, most of it influenced by
the same sort of comic books as the ones that had given Vern nightmares.
And when he was done, Richie looked at me in a strange new way that
made me feel very peculiar, as if he
had been forced to reappraise my whole personality. He said, You're
pretty good at this. Why don't you show these to Chris? I said no, I wanted
it to be a secret, and Richie said: Why It ain't pussy. You ain't no queer. I
mean, it ain't poetry.
Still, I made him promise not to tell anybody about my stories and of
course he did and it turned out most of them liked to read the stuff I wrote,
which was mostly about getting buried alive or some crook coming back
from the dead and slaughtering the jury that had condemned him in Twelve
Interesting Ways or a maniac that went crazy and chopped a lot of people
into veal cutlets before the hero, Curt Cannon, 'cut the subhuman,
screeching madman to pieces with round after round from his smoking.45
automatic.' In my stories, they were always rounds. Never bullets.
For a change of pace, there were the Le Dio stories. Le Dio was a town in
France, and during 1942, a grim squad of tired American dog-faces were
trying to retake it from the Nazis (this was two years before I discovered
that the Allies didn't land in France until 1944). They went on trying to re-
take it, fighting their way from street to street, through about forty stories
which I wrote between the ages of nine and fourteen. Teddy was absolutely
made for the Le Dio stories, and I think I wrote the last dozen or so just for
him -by then I was heartily sick of Le Dio and writing things like Mon Dieu
and Cherchez le Bochel and Fermez la portel In Le Dio, French peasants
were always hissing to GI dogfaces to Fermez la portel But Teddy would
hunch over the pages, his eyes big, his brow beaded with sweat, his face
twisting. There were times when I could almost hear air-cooled Brownings
and whistling 88s going off in his skull. The way he clamoured for more Le
Dio stories was both pleasing and frightening.
Nowadays writing is my work and the pleasure has diminished a little,
and more and more often that guilty, masturbatory pleasure has become
associated in my head with the coldly clinical images of artificial
insemination: I come according to the rules and regs laid down in my
publishing contract. And although no one is ever going to call me the
Thomas Wolfe of my generation, I rarely feel like a cheat: I get it off as
hard as I can every fucking time. Doing less would, in an odd way, be like
going faggot-or what that meant to us back then. What scares me is how
often it hurts these days. Back then I was sometimes disgusted by how
damned good it felt to write. These days I sometimes look at this typewriter
and wonder when it's going to run out of good words. I don't want that to
happen. I guess I can bear the pain as long as I don't run out of good words,
you know?
'What's this story?' Vern asked uneasily. 'It ain't a horror story, is it,
Gordie? I don't think I want to hear no horror stories. I'm not up for that,
man.'
'No, it ain't a horror,' Chris said. 'It's really funny. Gross, but funny. Go
on, Gordie. Hammer that fucker to us.'
'Is it about Le Dio?' Teddy asked.
'No, it ain't about Le Dio, you fuckin' psycho,' Chris said, and rabbit-
punched him. 'It's about this pie-eatin' contest.'
'Hey, I didn't even write it down yet,' I said.
'Yeah, but tell it'
'You guys want to hear it?'
'Sure,' Teddy said. 'Boss.'
'Well, it's about this made-up town, Gretna, I call it. Gretna, Maine.'
'Gretna?' Vern said, grinning. 'What kind of name is that? There ain't no
Gretna in Maine.'
'Shut up, fool,' Chris said. 'He just toldja it was made-up, didn't he?'
'Yeah, but Gretna, that sounds pretty stupid -'
'Lots of real towns sound stupid,' Chris said. 'I mean, what about Alfred,
Maine? Or Saco, Maine? Or Jerusalem's Lot? Or Castle-fuckin'-Rock?
There ain't no castle here. Most town names are stupid. You just don't think
so because you're used to 'em. Right, Gordie?'
'Sure,' I said, but privately I thought Vern was right- Gretna was a pretty
stupid name for a town. I just hadn't been able to think of another one. 'So
anyway, they're having their annual Pioneer Days, just like in Castle Rock -'
'Yeah, Pioneer Days, that's a fuckin' blast,' Vern said earnestly. 'I put my
whole family in that jail on wheels they have, even fuckin' Billy. It was only
for half an hour and it cost me my whole allowance but it was worth it just
to know where that sonofawhore was -'
'Will you shut up and let him tell it?' Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked. 'Sure. Yeah. Okay.'
'Go on, Gordie,' Chris said.
'It's not really much -'
'Naw, we don't expect much from a wet end like you,' Teddy said, 'but tell
it anyway.'
I cleared my throat. 'So anyway. It's Pioneer Days, and on the last night
they have these three big events. There's an egg-roll for the little kids and a
sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine, and then there's the pie-eating
contest. And the main guy of the story is this fat kid nobody likes named
Davie Hogan.'
'Like Charlie Hogan's brother if he had one,' Vern said, and then shrank
back as Chris rabbit-punched him again.
'This kid, he's our age, but he's fat. He weighs like one-eighty and he's
always gettin' beat up and ranked out. And all the kids, instead of calling
him Davie, they call him Lard Ass Hogan and rank him out whenever they
get the chance.'
They nodded respectfully, showing the proper sympathy for Lard Ass,
although if such a guy ever showed up in Castle Rock, we all would have
been out teasing him and ranking him to the dogs and back.
'So he decided to take revenge because he's, like, fed up, you know? He's
only in the pie- eating contest, but that's like the final event during Pioneer
Days and everyone really digs it. The prize is five bucks -'
'So he wins it and gives the finger to everybody!' Teddy said. 'Boss!'
'No, it's better than that,' Chris said. 'Just shut up and listen.'
'Lard Ass figures to himself, five bucks, what's that? If anybody
remembers anything at all in two weeks, it'll just be that fuckin' pig Hogan
out-ate everybody, well, it figures, let's go over his house and rank the shit
out of him, only now we'll call him Pie Ass instead of Lard Ass.'
They nodded some more, agreeing that Davie Hogan was a thinking cat. I
began to warm to my own story.
'But everybody expects him to enter the contest, you know. Even his
mom and dad. Hey, they practically got that five bucks spent for him
already.'
'Yeah, right,' Chris said.
'So he's thinkin' about it and hating the whole thing, because being fat
isn't really his fault. See, he'd got these weird fuckin' glands, somethin', and
-'
'My cousin's like that!' Vern said excitedly. 'Sincerely! She weighs close
to three hundred pounds! Supposed to be her Hyboid Gland or something
like that. I dunno about her Hyboid Gland, but what a fuckin' blimp, no shit,
she looks like a fuckin' Thanksgiving turkey, and this one time -'
'Will you shut the fuck up, Vern?' Chris cried violently. 'For the last time!
Honest to God!' He had finished his Coke and now he turned the hourglass-
shaped green bottle upside down and brandished it over Vent's head.
'Yeah, right, I'm sorry. Go on, Gordie. It's a swell story.'
I smiled. I didn't really mind Vern's interruptions, but of course I couldn't
tell Chris that; he was the self-appointed Guardian of Art. 'So he's turnin' it
over in his mind, you know, the whole week before the contest At school
kids keep comin' up to him and sayin' Hey Lard Ass, how many pies ya
gonna eat? Ya gonna eat ten? Twenty? Fuckin' eighty! And Lard Ass, he
says, How should I know. I don't even know what kind they are. And see,
there's quite a bit of interest in the contest because the champ is this
grownup whose name is, uh, Bill Traynor, I guess. And this guy Traynor, he
ain't even fat In fact, he's a real stringbean. But he can eat pies like a whiz,
and the year before he ate six pies in five minutes.'
'Whole pies?' Teddy asked, awe-struck.
'Right you are. And Lard Ass, he's the youngest guy to ever be in the
contest'
'Go, Lard Ass!' Teddy cried excitedly. 'Scoff up those fuckin' pies!'
'Tell 'em about the other guys in it,' Chris said.
'Okay. Besides Lard Ass Hogan and Bill Traynor, there was Calvin Spier,
the fattest guy in town-he ran the jewellery store -'
'Gretna Jewels,' Vern said, and snickered. Chris gave him a black look.
'And then there's this guy who's a disc jockey at a radio station up in
Lewiston, he ain't exactly fat but he's sorta chubby, you know. And the last
guy was Hubert Gretna the Third, who was the principal of Lard Ass
Hogan's school.'
'He was eatin' against his own principal!' Teddy asked.
Chris clutched his knees and rocked back and forth joyfully. 'Ain't that
great! Go on, Gordie!'
I had them now. They were all leaning forward. I felt an intoxicating
sense of power. I tossed my empty Coke bottle into the woods and
scrunched around a little bit to get comfortable. I remember hearing the
chickadee again, off in the woods, farther away now, lifting its monotonous,
endless call into the sky: dee-dee-dee dee 'So he gets this idea,' I said. The
greatest revenge idea a kid ever had. The big night comes-the end of
Pioneer Days. The pie-eating contest comes just before the fireworks. The
Main Street of Gretna has been closed off so people can walk around in it,
and there's this big platform set up right in the street. There's bunting
hanging down and a big crowd in front. There's also a photographer from
the paper, to get a picture of the winner with blueberries all over his face,
because it turned out to be blueberry pies that year. Also, I almost forgot to
tell you this, they had to eat the pies with their hands tied behind their
backs. So, dig it, they come up onto the platform'
16
From The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan, by Gordon Lachance, originally
published in Cavalier magazine, March, 1975. Used by permission.
They came up onto the platform one by one and stood behind a long
trestie table covered with a linen cloth. The table was stacked high with pies
and stood at the edge of the platform. Above it were looped necklaces of
bare 100-watt bulbs, moths and night-fliers banging softly against them and
haloing them. Above the platform, bathed in spotlights, was a long sign
which read: THE GREAT GRETNA PIE-EAT OF 1960! To either side of
this sign hung battered loudspeakers, supplied by Chuck Day of the Great
Day Appliance Shop. Bill Travis, the reigning champion, was Chuck's
cousin. As each contestant came up, his hands bound behind him and his
shirtfront open, like Sidney Carton on his way to the guillotine, Mayor
Charbonneau would announce his name over Chuck's PA system and tie a
large white bib around his neck. Calvin Spier received token applause only;
in spite of his belly, which was the size of a twenty-gallon waterbarrel, he
was considered an underdog second only to the Hogan kid (most considered
Lard Ass a comer, but too young and inexperienced to do much this year).
After Spier, Bob Cormier was introduced. Cormier was a disc jockey who
did a popular afternoon programme at WLAM in Lewiston. He got a bigger
hand, accompanied by a few screams from the teenaged girls in the
audience. The girls thought he was 'cute'. John Wiggins, principal of Gretna
Elementary School, followed Cormier. He received a hearty cheer from the
older section of the audience-and a few scattered boos from fractious
members of his student body. Wiggins managed to beam paternally and
frown sternly down on the audience at the same time. Next, Mayor
Charbonneau introduced Lard Ass.
'A new participant in the annual Great Gretna Pie-Eat, but one we expect
great things from in the future young master David Hogan! Lard Ass got a
big round of applause as Mayor Charbonneau tied on his bib, and as it was
dying away, a rehearsed Greek chorus just beyond the reach of the 100-watt
bulbs cried out in wicked unison: '
'Go-get-'em-Lard Ass!'
There were muffled shrieks of laughter, running footsteps, a few shadows
that no one could (or would) identify, some nervous laughter, some judicial
frowns (the largest from Hizzoner Charbonneau, the most visible figure of
authority). Lard Ass himself appeared to not even notice. The small smile
greasing his thick lips and creasing his thick chops did not change as the
Mayor, still frowning largely, tied his bib around his neck and told him not
to pay any attention to fools in the audience (as if the Mayor had even the
faintest inkling of what monstrous fools Lard Ass Hogan had suffered and
would continue to suffer as he rumbled through life like a Nazi Tiger Tank).
The Mayor's breath was warm and smelled of beer.
The last contestant to mount the bunting-decorated stage drew the loudest
and most sustained applause; this was the legendary Bill Travis, six feet
five inches tall, gangling, voracious. Travis was a mechanic at the local
Amoco station down by the railyard, a likeable fellow if there ever was
one.; It was common knowledge around town that there was more involved
in the Great Gretna Pie-Eat than a mere five dollars-at least, for Bill Travis
there was. There were two reasons for this. First, people always came by
the station to congratulate Bill after he won the contest, and most everyone
who came to congratulate stayed to get his gas-tank filled. And the two
garage-bays were sometimes booked up for a solid month after the contest.
Folks would come in to get a muffler replaced or their wheel-bearings
greased, and would sit in the theatre chairs ranged along one wall (Jerry
Mating, who owned the Amoco, had salvaged them from the old Gem
Theatre when it was torn down in 1957), drinking Cokes and Moxies from
out of the machine and gassing with Bill about the contest as he changed
sparkplugs or rolled around on a crawlie-wheelie under someone's
International Harvester pickup, looking for holes in the exhaust system. Bill
always seemed willing to talk, which was one of the reasons he was so
well-liked in Gretna. There was some dispute around town as to whether
Jerry Maling gave Bill a flat bonus for the extra business his yearly feat (or
yearly eat, if you prefer) brought in, or if he got an out-and-out raise.
Whatever way it was, there could be no doubt that Travis did much better
than most small-town wrench jockeys. He had a nice-looking two-storey
ranch out on the Sabbatus Road, and certain snide people referred to it as
'the house that pies built'. That was probably an exaggeration, but Bill had it
coming another way which brings us to the second reason there was more
in it for Travis than just five dollars. The pie-eat was a hot wagering event
in Gretna. Perhaps most people only came to laugh, but a goodly minority
also came to lay their money down. Contestants were observed and
discussed by these betters as ardently as thoroughbreds are observed and
discussed by racing touts. The wagerers accosted contestants' friends,
relatives, even mere acquaintances. They pried out any and all details
concerning the contestants' eating habits. There was always a lot of
discussion about that year's official pie-apple was considered a 'heavy' pie,
apricot a 'light' one (although a contestant had to resign himself to a day or
two of the trots after downing three or four apricot pies). That year's official
pie, blueberry, was considered a happy medium. Betters, of course, were
particularly interested in their man's stomach for blueberry dishes. How did
he do on blueberry buckle? Did he favour blueberry jam over strawberry
preserve? Had he been known to sprinkle blueberries on his breakfast
cereal, or was he strictly a bananas-and-cream sort of fellow?
There were other questions of some moment. Was he a fast eater who
slowed down or a slow eater who started to speed up as things got serious
or just a good steady all-around trencher-man? How many hot dogs could
he put away while watching a Babe Ruth League game down at the St
Dom's baseball field? Was he much of a beer-drinker, and, if so, how many
bottles did he usually put away in the course of an evening? Was he a
belcher? It was believed that a good belcher was a bit tougher to beat over
the long haul.
All of this and other information was sifted, the odds laid, the bets made.
How much money actually changed hands during the week or so following
pie-night I have no way of knowing, but if you held a gun to my head and
forced me to guess, I'd put it at close to a thousand dollars-that probably
sounds like a pretty paltry figure, but it was a lot of money to be passing
around in such a small town fifteen years ago.
And because the contest was honest and a strict time-limit of ten minutes
was observed, no one objected to a competitor betting on himself, and Bill
Travis did so every year.
Talk was, as he nodded, smiling, to his audience on that summer night in
1960, that he had bet a substantial amount on himself again, and that the
best he had been able to do this year was one-for-five odds. If you're not the
betting type, let me explain it this way: he'd have to put two hundred and
fifty dollars at risk to win fifty. Not a good deal at all, but it was the price of
success-and as he stood there, soaking up the applause and smiling easy, he
didn't look too worried about it.
'And the defending champion,' Mayor Charbonneau trumpeted, 'Gretna's
own Bill Travis!'
'Hoo, Bill!'
'How many you goin' through tonight, Bill?'
'You goin' for ten, Billy-boy?'
'I got a two-spot on you, Bill! Don't let me down, boy!'
'Save me one of those pies, Trav!'
Nodding and smiling with all proper modesty, Bill Travis allowed the
Mayor to tie his bib around his neck. Then he sat down at the far right end
of the table, near the place where Mayor Charbonneau would stand during
the contest. From right to
left, then, the eaters were Bill Travis, David 'Lard Ass' Hogan, Bob
Cormier, principal John Wiggins, and Calvin Spier holding down the stool
on the far left.
Mayor Charbonneau introduced Sylvia Dodge, who was even more of a
contest figure than Bill Travis himself. She had been President of the
Gretna Ladies' Auxiliary for years beyond telling (since the First Manassas,
according to some town wits), and it was she who oversaw the baking of
each year's pies, strictly subjecting each to her own rigorous quality control,
which included a weigh-in ceremony on Mr Bancichek's butcher's scales
down at the Freedom Market -this to make sure that each pie weighed
within an ounce of the others.
Sylvia smiled regally down at the crowd, her blue hair twinkling under
the hot glow of the light-bulbs. She made a short speech about how glad she
was that so much of the town had turned out to celebrate their hardy pioneer
forebears, the people who made this country great, for it was great, not only
on the grassroots level where Mayor Charbonneau would be leading the
local Republicans to the hallowed seats of town government again in
November, but on the national level where the team of Nixon and Lodge
would take the torch of freedom from Our Great and Beloved General and
hold it high for-Calvin Spier's belly rumbled noisily-Goinnnngg! There was
laughter and even some applause. Sylvia Dodge, who knew perfectly well
that Calvin was both a Democrat and a Catholic (either would have been
forgivable alone, but the two combined, never), managed to blush, smile,
and look furious all at the same time. She cleared her throat and wound up
with a ringing exhortation to every boy and girl in the audience, telling
them to always hold the red, white, and blue high, both in their hands and in
their hearts, and to remember that smoking was a dirty, evil habit which
made you cough. The boys and girls in the audience, most of whom would
be wearing peace medallions and smoking not Camels but marijuana in
another eight years, shuffled their feet and waited for the action to begin.
'Less talk, more eatin'!' someone in the back row called, and there was
another burst of applause-it was heartier this time.
Mayor Charbonneau handed Sylvia a stopwatch and a silver police
whistle, which she would blow at the end of the ten minutes of all-out pie-
eating. Mayor Charbonneau would then step forward and hold up the hand
of the winner.
'Are you ready??' Hizzoner's voice rolled triumphantly through the Great
Day PA and off down Main Street.
The five pie-eaters declared they were ready. 'Are you SET??' Hizzoner
enquired further.
The eaters growled that they were indeed set. Downstreet, a boy set off a
rattling skein of firecrackers.
Mayor Charbonneau raised one pudgy hand and then dropped it 'GO!!!'
Five heads dropped into five pie-plates. The sound was like five large feet
stamping firmly into mud. Wet chomping noises rose on the mild night air
and then were blotted out as the betters and partisans in the crowd began to
cheer on their favourites. And no more than the first pie had been
demolished before most people realised that a possible upset was in the
making.
Lard Ass Hogan, a seven-to-one underdog because of his age and
inexperience, was eating like a boy possessed. His jaws machine-gunned up
crust (the contest rules required that only the top crust of the pie be eaten,
not the bottom), and when that had disappeared, a huge sucking sound
issued from between his lips. It was like the sound of an industrial vacuum
cleaner going to work. Moments later his whole head disappeared into the
pie-plate. He raised it fifteen seconds later to indicate he was done. His
cheeks and forehead were smeared with blueberry juice, and he looked like
an extra in a minstrel show. He was done-done before the legendary Bill
Travis had finished half of his first pie.
Startled applause went up as the Major examined Lard Ass's pie-plate
and pronounced it clean enough. He whipped a second pie into place before
the pacemaker. Lard Ass had gobbled a regulation-size pie in just forty-two
seconds. It was a contest record. He went at the second pie even more
furiously yet, his head bobbing and smooching in the soft blueberry filling,
and Bill Travis threw him a worried glance as he called for his second
blueberry pie. As he told friends later, he felt he was in a real contest for the
first time since 1957, when George Gamache gobbled three pies in four
minutes and then fainted dead away. He had to wonder, he said, if he was
up against a boy or a demon. He thought of the money he had riding on this
and redoubled his efforts. But if Travis had redoubled, Lard Ass had
trebled. Blueberries flew from his second pie-dish, staining the tablecloth
around him like a Jackson Pollock painting. There were blueberries in his
hair, blueberries in his bib, blueberries standing out on his forehead as if, in
an agony of concentration, he had actually begun to sweat blueberries.
'Done!' he cried, lifting his head from his second pie dish before Bill Travis
had even consumed the crust on his new pie.
'Better slow down, boy,' Hizzoner murmured. Charbonneau himself had
ten dollars riding on Bill Travis. 'You got to pace yourself if you want to
hold out.'
It was as if Lard Ass hadn't heard. He tore into his third pie with lunatic
speed, jaws moving with lightning rapidity. And then-But I must interrupt
for a moment to tell you that there was an empty bottle in the medicine
cabinet at Lard Ass Hogan's house. Earlier, that bottle had been three-
quarters full of pearl-yellow castor oil, perhaps the most noxious fluid '. that
the good Lord, in His infinite wisdom, ever allowed upon or beneath the
face of the earth. Lard Ass had emptied that bottle himself, drinking every
last drop and then licking the rim, his mouth twisting, his belly gagging
sourly, his brain filled with thoughts of sweet revenge.
And as he rapidly worked his way through his third pie Calvin Spier,
dead last as predicted, had not yet finished his first), Lard Ass began to
deliberately torture himself with grisly fantasies. He was not eatin' pies at
all; he was eating cowflops. He was eating great big gobs of greasy grimy
gopher-guts. He was eating diced-up woodchuck intestines with blueberry
sauce poured over them. Rancid blueberry sauce.
He finished his third pie and called for his fourth, now one full pie ahead
of the legendary Bill Travis. The fickle crowd, sensing a new and
unexpected champ in the making, began to cheer him on lustily.
But Lard Ass had no hope or intention of winning. He could not have
continued at the pace he was currently setting if his own mother's life had
been the prize. And besides, winning for him was losing; revenge was the
only blue ribbon he sought. His belly groaning with castor oil, his throat
opening and closing sickly, he finished his fourth pie and called for his fifth,
the Ultimate Pie-Blueberries Become Electra, so to speak. He dropped his
head into the dish, breaking the crust, and snuffled blueberries up his nose.
Blueberries went down his shirt. The contents of his stomach seemed to
suddenly gain weight. He chewed up pastry crust and swallowed it. He
inhaled blueberries.
And suddenly the moment of revenge was at hand. His stomach, loaded
beyond endurance, revolted. It clenched like a strong hand encased in a
slick rubber glove. His throat opened.
Lard Ass raised his head.
He grinned at Bill Travis with blue teeth.
Puke rumbled up his throat like a six-ton Peterbilt shooting through a
tunnel.
It roared out of his mouth in a huge blue-and-yellow glurt, warm and
gaily steaming. It covered Bill Travis, who only had time to utter one
nonsense syllable-'Goog' was what it sounded like. Women in the audience
screamed. Calvin Spier, who had watched this unannounced event with a
numb and surprised expression on his face, leaned conversationally over the
table as if to explain to the gaping audience just what was happening, and
puked on the head of Marguerite Charbonneau, the Mayor's wife. She
screamed and backed away, pawing futilely at her hair, which was now
covered with a mixture of crushed berries, baked beans, and partially
digested frankfurters (the latter two had been Cal Spier's dinner). She turned
to her good friend Maria Lavin and threw up on the front of Maria's
buckskin jacket.
In rapid succession, like a replay of the firecrackers:.
Bill Travis blew a great-and seemingly supercharged -jet of vomit out
over the first two rows of spectators, his stunned face proclaiming to one
and all, Man, I just can't believe I'm doing this; Chuck Day, who had
received a generous portion of Bill Travis's surprise gift, threw up on his
Hush Puppies and then blinked at them wonderingly, knowing full well that
stuff would never come off suede; John Wiggins, principal of Gretna
Elementary, opened his blue-lined mouth and said reprovingly: 'Really, this
has YURRRK!' As befitted a man of his breeding and position, he did it in
his own pie-plate; Hizzonner Charbonneau, who found himself suddenly
presiding over what must have seemed more like a stomach-flu hospital
ward than a pie-eating contest, opened his mouth to call the whole thing off
and upchucked all over the microphone. 'Jesus save us,' moaned Sylvia
Dodge, and then her outraged supper-fried clams, cole slaw, butter-and-
sugar corn (two ears' worth), and a generous helping of Muriel Harrington's
Bosco chocolate cake-bolted out the emergency exit and landed with a large
wet splash on the back of the Mayor's Robert Hall suitcoat. Lard Ass
Hogan, now at the absolute apogee of his young life, beamed happily out
over the audience. Puke was everywhere. People staggered around in
drunken circles, holding their throats and making weak cawing noises.
Somebody's pet Pekinese ran past the stage, yapping crazily, and a man
wearing jeans and a Western-style silk shirt threw up on it, nearly drowning
it. Mrs Brockway, the Methodist minister's wife, made a long, bass belching
noise which was followed by a gusher of degenerated roast beef and
mashed potatoes and apple cobbler. The cobbler looked as if it might have
been quite good when it first went down. Jerry Maling, who had come to
see his pet mechanic walk away with all the marbles again, decided to get
the righteous fuck out of this madhouse. He got about fifteen yards before
tripping over a kid's little red wagon and realizing he had landed in a puddle
of warm bile, Jerry tossed his cookies in his own lap and told folks later he
only thanked Providence he had been wearing his coveralls. And Miss
Norman, who taught Latin and English Fundamentals at the Gretna
Consolidated High School, vomited into her own purse in an agony of
propriety.
Lard Ass Hogan watched it all, his large face calm and beaming, his
stomach suddenly sweet and steady with a warm balm it might never know
again-that balm was a feeling of utter and complete satisfaction. He stood
up, took the slightly tacky microphone from the trembling hand of Mayor
Charbonneau, and said
'I declare this contest a draw.' Then he puts the mike down, walks off the
back of the platform, and goes straight home. His mother's there, on account
of she couldn't get a babysitter for Lard Ass's little sister, who was only
two. And as soon as he comes in, all covered with puke and pie drool, still
wearin' his bib, she says, "Davie, did you win?" But he doesn't say a fuckin'
word, you know. Just goes upstairs to his room, locks the door, and lays
down on his bed.'
I downed the last swallow in Chris's Coke and tossed it into the woods.
'Yeah, that's cool, then what happened?' Teddy asked eagerly.
'I don't know.'
'What do you mean, you don't knowT Teddy asked.
'It means it's the end. When you don't know what happens next, that's the
end.'
'Whaaaat? Vern cried. There was an upset, suspicious look on his face,
like he thought maybe he'd just gotten rooked playing penny-up Bingo at
the Topsham Fair. 'What's all this happy crappy? How'd it come out?'
'You have to use your imagination,' Chris said patiently.
'No, I ain't!' Vern said angrily. 'He's supposed to use his imagination! He
made up the fuckin' story!'
'Yeah, what happened to the cat?' Teddy persisted. 'Come on, Gordie, tell
us.'
'I think his dad was at the Pie-Eat and when he came home he beat the
living crap out of Lard Ass.'
'Yeah, right,' Chris said. 'I bet that's just what happened.'
'And,' I said, 'the kids went right on calling him Lard Ass. Except that
maybe some of them started calling him Puke-Yer-Guts, too.'
'That ending sucks,' Teddy said sadly.
'That's why I didn't want to tell it.'
'You could have made it so he shot his father and ran away and joined the
Texas Rangers,' Teddy said. 'How about that?'
Chris and I exchanged a glance. Chris raised one shoulder in a barely
perceptible shrug. 'I guess so,' I said.
'Hey, you got any new Le Dio stories, Gordie?'
'Not just now. Maybe I'll think of some.' I didn't want to upset Teddy, but
I wasn't very interested in checking out what was happening in Le Dio,
either. 'Sorry you didn't go for this one better.'
'Nah, it was good,' Teddy said. 'Right up to the end, it was good. All that
pukin' was really cool.'
'Yeah, that was cool, really gross,' Vern agreed. 'But Teddy's right about
the ending. It was sort of a gyp.'
'Yeah,' I said, and sighed.
Chris stood up. 'Let's do some walking,' he said. It was still bright
daylight, the sky a hot, steely blue, but our shadows had begun to trail out
long. I remember that as a kid, September days always seemed to end much
too soon, catching me by surprise-it was as if something inside my heart
expected it to always be June, with daylight lingering in the sky until almost
nine-thirty. 'What time is it, Gordie?' I looked at my watch and was
astonished to see it was after five. 'Yeah, let's go,' Teddy said. 'But let's
make camp before dark so we can see to get wood and stuff. I'm gettin'
hungry, too.'
'Six-thirty,' Chris promised. 'Okay with you guys?'
It was. We started to walk again, using the cinders beside the tracks now.
Soon the river was so far behind us we couldn't even hear its sound.
Mosquitoes hummed
and I slapped one off my neck. Vern and Teddy were walking up ahead,
working out some sort of complicated comic book trade. Chris was beside
me, hands in his pockets, shirt slapping against his knees and thighs like an
apron.
'I got some Winstons,' he said. 'Hawked 'em off my old man's dresser.
One apiece. For after supper.'
'Yeah? That's boss.'
"That's when a cigarette tastes best,' Chris said. 'After supper.'
'Right.' We walked in silence for a while.
'That's a really fine story,' Chris said suddenly. 'They're just a little too
dumb to understand.'
'No, it's not that hot. It's a mumbler.'
'That's what you always say. Don't give me that bullshit you don't
believe. Are you gonna write it down? The story?'
'Probably. But not for a while. I can't write 'em down right after I tell 'em.
It'll
keep.'
'What Vern said? About the ending being a gyp?'
'Yeah?'
Chris laughed. 'Life's a gyp, you know it? I mean, look at us.'
'Nah, we have a great time.'
'Sure,' Chris said. 'All the fuckin' time, you wet.'
I laughed. Chris did, too.
They come outta you just like bubbles out of soda-pop,' he said after a
while.
'What does?' But I thought I knew what he meant.
'The stories. That really bugs me, man. It's like you could tell a million
stories and still only get the ones on top. You'll be a great writer someday,
Gordie.'
'No, I don't think so.'
'Yeah, you will. Maybe you'll even write about us guys if you ever get
hard up for material.'
'Have to be pretty fuckin' hard up.' I gave him the elbow.
There was another period of silence and then he asked suddenly: 'You
ready for school?'
I shrugged. Who ever was? You got a little excited thinking about going
back, seeing your friends; you were curious about your new teachers and
what they would be like-pretty young things just out of teachers' college
that you could rag or some old topkick that had been there since the Alamo,
In a funny way you could even get excited about the long droning classes,
because as the summer vacation neared its end you sometimes got bored
enough to believe you could learn something. But summer boredom was
nothing like the school boredom that always set in by the end of the second
week, and by the beginning of the third week you got down to the real
business: Could you hit Stinky Fiske in the back of the head with your art-
gum while the teacher was putting The Principal Exports of South America
on the board? How many good loud squeaks could you get off on the
varnished surface of your desk if your hands were real sweaty? Who could
cut the loudest farts in the locker room while changing up for phys ed? How
many girls could you get to play Who Goosed the Moose during lunch
hour? Higher learning, baby.
'Junior High,' Chris said. 'And you know what, Gordie? By next June,
we'll all be quits.'
'What are you talking about? Why would that happen?'
'It's not gonna be like grammar school, that's why. You'll be in the college
courses. Me and Teddy and Vern, we'll all be in the shop courses, playing
pocket-pool
with the rest of the retards, making ashtrays and birdhouses. Vern might
even have to go into Remedial. You'll meet a lot of new guys. Smart guys.
That's just the way it works, Gordie. That's how they got it set up.'
'Meet a lot of pussies is what you mean,' I said.
He gripped my arm. 'No, man. Don't say that. Don't even think that.
They'll get your stories. Not like Vern and Teddy.'
'Fuck the stories. I'm not going in with a lot of pussies. No sir.'
'If you don't, then you're an asshole.'
'What's asshole about wanting to be with your friends?'
He looked at me thoughtfully, as if deciding whether or not to tell me
something. We had slowed down; Vern and Teddy had pulled almost half a
mile ahead. The sun, lower now, came at us through the overlacing trees in
broken, dusty shafts, turning everything gold -but it was a tawdry gold,
dimestore gold, if you can dig that. The tracks stretched ahead of us in the
gloom that was just starting to gather -they seemed almost to twinkle. Star-
pricks of light stood out on them here and there, as if some nutty rich guy
masquerading as a common labourer had decided to embed a diamond in
the steel every sixty yards or so. It was still hot. The sweat rolled off us,
slicking our bodies.
'It's asshole if your friends can drag you down,' Chris said finally. 'I know
about you and your folks. They don't give a shit about you. Your big brother
was the one they cared about. Like my dad, when Frank got thrown into the
stockade in Portsmouth. That was when he started always bein' mad at us
other kids and hitting us all the time. Your dad doesn't beat on you, but
maybe that's even worse. He's got you asleep. You could tell him you were
enrolling in the fuckin' shop division and you know what he'd do? He'd turn
to the next page in his paper and say, Well, that's nice, Gordon, go ask your
mother what's for dinner. And don't try to tell me different I've met him.'
I didn't try to tell him different. It's scary to find out that someone else,
even a friend, knows just how things are with you. 'You're just a kid, Gordie
-'
'Gee, thanks, Dad.'
'I wish to fuck I was your father!' he said angrily. 'You wouldn't go
around talking about taking those stupid shop courses if I was! It's like God
gave you something, all those stories you can make up, and He said, This is
what we got for you, kid. Try not to lose it. But kids lose everything unless
somebody looks out for them and if your folks are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.'
His face looked like he was expecting me to take a swing at him; it was
set and unhappy in the green-gold late afternoon light. He had broken the
cardinal rule for kids in those days. You could say anything about another
kid, you could rank him to the dogs and back, but you didn't say a bad word
ever about his mom and dad. That was the Fabled Automatic, the same way
not inviting your Catholic friends home to dinner on Friday unless you'd
checked first to make sure you weren't having meat was the Fabled
Automatic. If a kid ranked out your Mom and Dad, you had to feed him a
knuckle sandwich.
"Those stories you tell, they're no good to anybody but you, Gordie. If
you go along with us just because you don't want the gang to break up,
you'll wind up just another grunt, making Cs to get on the teams. You'll get
to High and take the same fuckin' shop courses and throw erasers and pull
your meat along with the rest of the grunts. Get detentions. Fuckin'
suspensions. And after a while all you'll care about is gettin' a car so you
can take some skag to the hops or down to the fuckin' Twin Bridges Tavern.
Then you'll knock her up and spend the rest of your life in the mill or
some fuckin' shoeshop in Auburn or maybe even up to Hillcrest pluckin'
chickens. And that pie story will never get written down. Nothin'll get
written down. 'Cause you'll just be another wiseguy with shit for brains.'
Chris Chambers was twelve when he said all that to me. But while he
was saying it his face crumpled and folded into something older, oldest,
ageless. He spoke tonelessly, colourlessly, but nevertheless, what he said
struck terror into my bowels. It was as if he had lived that whole life
already, -that life where they tell you to step right up and spin the Wheel of
Fortune, and it spins so pretty and the guy steps on a pedal and it comes up
double zeros, house number, everybody loses. They give you a free pass
and then turn on the rain machine, pretty funny, huh, a joke even Vern
Tessio could appreciate.
He grabbed my naked arm and his fingers closed tight. They dug grooves
in my flesh.
They ground at the bones. His eyes were hooded and dead-so dead, man,
that he might have just fallen out of his own coffin.
'I know what people think of my family in this town. I know what they
think of me and what they expect. Nobody even asked me if I took the
milk-money that time. I just got a three-day vacation.'
'Did you take it?' I asked. I had never asked him before, and if you had
told me I ever would, I would have called you crazy. The words came out in
a little dry bullet.
'Yeah,' he said. 'Yeah, I took it.' He was silent for a moment, looking
ahead at Teddy and Vern. 'You knew I took it, Teddy knew, everybody
knew. Even Vern knew, I think.'
I started to deny it, and then closed my mouth. He was right. No matter
what I might have said to my mother and father about how a person was
supposed to be innocent until proved guilty, I had known.
'Then maybe I was sorry and tried to give it back,' Chris said.
I stared at him, my eyes widening. 'You tried to give it back!'
'Maybe, I said. Just maybe. And maybe I took it to old lady Simons and
told her, and maybe the money was all there and I got a three-day vacation
anyway, because the money never showed up. And maybe the next week
old lady Simons had this brand-new skirt on when she came to school.'
I stared at Chris, speechless with horror. He smiled at me, but it was a
crimped, terrible smile that never touched his eyes.
'Just maybe,' he said, but I remembered the new skirt-a light brown
paisley, sort of full. I remembered thinking that it made old lady Simons
look younger, almost pretty.
'Chris, how much was that milk-money?'
'Almost seven bucks.'
'Christ,' I whispered.
'So I just say that I stole the milk-money but then old lady Simons stole it
from me. Just suppose. Then suppose I told that story. Me, Chris Chambers.
Kid brother of Frank Chambers and Eyeball Chambers. You think anybody
would have believed it?'
'No way,' I whispered. 'Jesus, Chris!'
He smiled his wintry, awful smile. 'And do you think that bitch would
have dared try something like that if it had been one of those dootchbags
from up on The View that had taken the money?'
'No,' I said.
'Yeah. If it had been one of them, Simons would have said 'kay, 'kay,
we'll forget it this time, but we're gonna spank your wrist real hard and if
you ever do it
again we'll have to spank both wrists. But me well, maybe she had her
eye on that skirt for a long time.
Anyway, she saw her chance and she took it. I was the stupid one for
even trying to give that money back. But I never thought I never thought
that a teacher oh who gives a fuck, anyway? Why am I even -talkin' about
it?'
He swiped an arm angrily across his eyes and I realized he was almost
crying.
'Chris,' I said, 'why don't you go into the college courses? You're smart
enough.'
'They decide all of that in the office. And in their smart little conferences.
The teachers, they sit around in this big circle-jerk and all they say is Yeah,
Yeah, Right, Right All they give a fuck about is whether you behaved
yourself in grammar school and what the town thinks of your family. All
they're deciding is whether or not you'll contaminate all those precious
college-course dootchbags. But maybe I'll try to work myself up. I don't
know if I could do it, but I might try. Because I want to get out of Castle
Rock and go to college and never see my old man or any of my brothers
again. I want to go someplace where nobody knows me and I don't have any
black marks against me before I start. But I don't know if I can do it.'
'Why not?'
'People. People drag you down.'
'Who?' I asked, thinking he must mean the teachers, or adult monsters
like Miss Simons, who had wanted a new skirt, or maybe his brother
Eyeball who hung around with Ace and Billy and Charlie and the rest, or
maybe his own Mom and Dad.
But he said: 'Your friends drag you down, Gordie. Don't you know that?'
He pointed at Vern and Teddy, who were standing and waiting for us to
catch up. They were laughing about something; in fact, Vern was just about
busting a gut.
'Your friends do. They're like drowning guys that are holding on to your
legs. You can't save them. You can only drown with them.'
'Come on, you fuckin' slowpokes!' Vern shouted, still laughing.
'Yeah, comin'!' Chris called, and before I could say anything else, he
began to run. I ran, too, but he caught up to them before I could catch up to
him.
18
We went another mile and then decided to camp for the night. There was
still some daylight left, but nobody really wanted to use it. We were pooped
from the scene at the dump and from our scare on the train trestle, but it was
more than that. We were in Harlow now, in the woods. Somewhere up
ahead was a dead kid, probably mangled and covered with flies. Maggots,
too, by this time. Nobody wanted to get too close to him with the night
coming on. I had read somewhere-in an Algernon Blackwood story, I think-
that a guy's ghost hangs out around his dead body until that body is given a
decent Christian burial, and there was no way I wanted to wake up in the
night and confront the glowing, disembodied ghost of Ray Brower,
moaning and gibbering and floating among the dark and rustling pines. By
stopping here we figured there had to be at least ten miles between us and
him, and of course all four of us knew there were no such things as ghosts,
but ten miles seemed just about far enough in case what everybody knew
was wrong.
Vern, Chris, and Teddy gathered wood and got a modest little campfire
going on a bed of cinders. Chris scraped a bare patch all around the fire-the
woods were powder-dry, and he didn't want to take any chances. While they
were doing that I sharpened some sticks and made what my brother Denny
used to call 'Pioneer Drumsticks'-lumps of hamburger pushed into the ends
of green branches. The three of them laughed and bickered over their
woodcraft (which was almost nil; there was a Castle Rock Boy Scout troop,
but most of the kids who hung around our vacant lot considered it to be an
organization made up mostly of pussies), arguing about whether it was
better to cook over flames or over coals (a moot point; we were too hungry
to wait for coals), whether dried moss would work as kindling, what they
would do if they used up all the matches before they got the fire to stay lit.
Teddy claimed he could make a fire by rubbing two sticks together. Chris
claimed he was so full of shit he squeaked. They didn't have to try; Vern got
the small pile of twigs and dry moss to catch from the second match. The
day was perfectly still and there was no wind to puff out the light. We all
took turns feeding the thin flames until they began to grow stouter on wrist-
thick chunks of wood fetched from an old deadfall some thirty yards into
the forest When the flames began to die back a little bit, I stuck the sticks
holding the Pioneer Drumsticks firmly into the ground at an angle over the
fire. We sat around watching them as they shimmered and dripped and
finally began to brown. Our stomachs made pre-dinner conversation.
Unable to wait until they were really cooked, we each took one of them,
stuck it in a roll, and yanked the hot stick out of the centre. They were
charred outside, raw inside, and totally delicious. We wolfed them down
and wiped the grease from our mouths with our bare arms. Chris opened his
pack and took out a tin Band-Aids box (the pistol was way at the bottom of
his pack, and because he hadn't told Vern and Teddy, I guessed it was to be
our secret). He opened it and gave each of us a battered Winston. We lit
them with flaming twigs from the fire and then leaned back, men of the
world, watching the cigarette smoke drift away into the soft twilight. None
of us inhaled because we might cough and that would mean a day or two of
ragging from the others. And it was pleasant enough just to drag and blow,
hawking into the fire to hear the sizzle (that was the summer I learned how
you can pick out someone who is just learning to smoke: if you're new at it
you spit a lot). We were feeling good. We smoked the Winstons down to the
filters, then tossed them into the fire. 'Nothin' like a smoke after a meal,'
Teddy said.
'Fucking-A,' Vern agreed.
Crickets had started to hum in the green gloom. I looked up at the lane of
sky visible through the railroad cut and saw that the blue was now bruising
towards purple. Seeing that outrider of twilight made me feel sad and calm
at the same: me, brave but not really brave, comfortably lonely.
We tramped down a flat place in the underbrush beside the embankment
and laid out our bedrolls. Then, for an hour or so, we fed the fire and talked,
the kind of talk you can never quite remember once you get past fifteen and
discover girls. We talked about who was the best dragger in Castle Rock, if
Boston could maybe stay out of the cellar this year, and about the summer
just past. Teddy told about the time he had been at White's Beach in
Brunswick and some kid had hit his head while diving off the float and
almost drowned. We discussed at some length the relative merits of the
teachers we had had. We agreed that Mr. Brooks was the biggest pussy in
Castle Rock Elementary-he would just about cry if you sassed him back. On
the other hand, there was Mrs. Cote (pronounced Cody)-she was just about
the meanest bitch God had ever set down on the earth. Vern said he'd heard
she hit a kid so hard two years ago that the kid almost went blind. I looked
at Chris, wondering if he would say anything about Miss Simons, but he
didn't say anything at all, and he didn't see me looking at him-he was
looking at Vern and nodding soberly at Vern's story.
We didn't talk about Ray Brower as the dark drew down, but I was
thinking about him. There's something horrible and fascinating about the
way dark comes to the woods, its coming unsoftened by headlights or
streetlights or houselights or neon. It comes with no mothers' voices, calling
for their kids to leave off and come on in now, to herald it. If you're used to
the town, the coming of the dark in the woods seems more like a natural
disaster than a natural phenomenon; it rises like the Castle River rises in the
spring. And as I thought about the body of Ray Brower in this light-or lack
of it-what I felt was not queasiness or fear that he would suddenly appear
before us, a green and gibbering banshee whose purpose was to drive us
back the way we had come before we could disturb his-its-peace, but a
sudden and unexpected wash of pity that he should be so alone and so
defenceless in the dark that was now coming over our side of the earth. If
something wanted to eat him, it would. His mother wasn't here to stop that
from happening, and neither was his father, nor Jesus Christ in the company
of all the saints. He was dead and he was all alone, flung off the railroad
tracks and into the ditch, and I realized that if I didn't stop thinking about it,
I was going to cry. So I told a Le Dio story, made up on the spot and not
very good, and when it ended as most of my Le Dio stories did, with one
lone American dogface coughing out a dying declaration of patriotism and
love for the girl back home into the sad and wise face of the platoon
sergeant, it was not the white, scared face of some pfc from Castle Rock or
White River Junction I saw in my mind's eye but the face of a much
younger boy, already dead, his eyes closed, his features troubled, a rill of
blood running from the left corner of his mouth to his jawline. And in back
of him, instead of the shattered shops and churches of my Le Dio
dreamscape, I saw only dark forest and the cindered railway bed bulking
against the starry sky like a prehistoric burial mound.
19
I came awake in the middle of the night, disoriented, wondering why it
was so chilly in my bedroom and who had left the windows open. Denny,
maybe. I had been dreaming of Denny, something about body-surfing at
Harrison State Park. But it had been four years ago that we had done that.
This wasn't my room: this was someplace else. Somebody was holding
me in a mighty bearhug. Somebody else was pressed against my back, and a
shadowy third was crouched beside me, head cocked in a listening attitude.
'What the fuck?' I asked in honest puzzlement.
A long drawn-out groan in answer. It sounded like Vern.
That brought things into focus, and I remembered where I was but what
was everybody doing awake in the middle of the night? Or had I only been
asleep for seconds? No, that couldn't be, because a thin sliver of moon was
floating dead centre in an inky sky.
'Don't let it get me,' Vern gibbered. 'I swear I'll be a good boy, I won't do
nothin' bad, I'll put the ring up before I take a piss, I'll I'll' With some
astonishment I realized that I was listening to a prayer-or at least the Vern
Tessio equivalent of a prayer.
I sat bolt upright, scared. 'Chris?'
'Shut up, Vern,' Chris said. He was the one crouching and listening. 'It's
nothing.'
'Oh yes it is,' Teddy said ominously. 'It's something.'
'What is?' I asked. I was still sleepy and disoriented, unstrung from my
place in space and time. It scared me that I had come in late on whatever
had developed-too late to defend myself properly, maybe.
Then, as if to answer my question, a long and hollow scream rose
languidly from the woods-it was the sort of scream you might expect from a
woman dying in extreme agony and extreme fear.
'Oh-dear-to-Jesus!' Vern whimpered, his voice high and filled with tears.
He reapplied the bearhug that had wakened me, making it hard for me to
breathe and adding to my own terror. I threw him loose with an effort but he
scrambled right back beside me like a puppy which can't think of anyplace
else to go.
'It's that Brower kid,' Teddy whispered hoarsely. 'His ghost's out walkin'
in the
woods.'
'Oh God!' Vern screamed, apparently not crazy about that idea at all. 'I
promise I won't hawk no more dirty books out of Dahlie's Market! I
promise I won't give my carrots to the dog no more I I I' He floundered
there, wanting to bribe God with everything but unable to think of anything
really good in the extremity of his fear. 'I won't smoke no more unfiltered
cigarettes! I won't say no bad swears! I won't put my Bazooka in the offerin
plate! I won't -'
'Shut up, Vern,' Chris said, and beneath his usual authoritative toughness
I could hear the hollow boom of awe. I wondered if his arms and back and
belly were as stiff with gooseflesh as my own were, and if the hair on the
nape of his neck was trying to stand up in hackles, as mine was.
Vern's voice dropped to a whisper as he continued to expand the reforms
he planned to institute if God would only let him live through this night.
'It's a bird, isn't it?' I asked Chris.
'No. At least, I don't think so. I think it's a wildcat My dad says they
scream bloody murder when they're getting ready to mate. Sounds like a
woman, doesn't it?'
'Yeah,' I said. My voice hitched in the middle of the word and two ice-
cubes broke off in the gap.
'But no woman could scream that loud,' Chris said and then added
helplessly: 'Could she, Gordie?'
'It's his ghost,' Teddy whispered again. His eyeglasses reflected the
moonlight in weak, somehow dreamy smears. 'I'm gonna go look for it'
I don't think he was serious, but we took no chances. When he started to
get up, Chris and I hauled him back down. Perhaps we were too rough with
him, but our muscles had been turned to cables with fear.
'Let me up, fuckheads!' Teddy hissed, struggling. 'If I say I wanna go
look for it, then I'm gonna go look for it! I wanna see it! I wanna see the
ghost! I wanna see it -
The wild, sobbing cry rose into the night again, cutting the air like a knife
with a crystal blade, freezing us with our hands on Teddy-if he'd been a
flag, we would have looked like that picture of the Marines claiming Iwo
Jima. The scream climbed with a crazy ease through octave after octave,
finally reaching a glassy, freezing edge. It hung there for a moment and then
whirled back down again, disappearing into an
impossible bass register that buzzed like a monstrous honeybee. This was
followed by a burst of what sounded like mad laughter and then there was
silence again.
'Jesus H Baldheaded Christ,' Teddy whispered, and he talked no more of
going into the woods to see what was making that screaming noise. All four
of us huddled up together and I thought of running. I doubt if I was the only
one. If we had been tenting in Vern's field-where our folks thought we
were-we probably would have run. But Castle Rock was too far, and the
thought of trying to run across that trestle in the dark made my blood freeze.
Running deeper into Harlow and closer to the corpse of Ray Brower was
equally unthinkable. We were stuck. If there was a ha'ant out there in the
woods-what my dad called a Goosalum-and it wanted us, it would probably
get us.
Chris proposed we keep a guard and everyone was agreeable to that. We
flipped for watches and Vern got the first one. I got the last. Vern sat up
cross-legged by the husk of the campfire while the rest of us lay down
again. We huddled together like sheep.
I was positive that sleep would be impossible, but I did sleep-a light,
uneasy sleep that skimmed through unconsciousness like a sub with its
periscope up. My half-sleeping dreams were populated with wild cries that
might have been real or might have only been products of my imagination. I
saw-or thought I saw-something white and shapeless steal through the trees
like a grotesquely ambulatory bedsheet.
At last I slipped into something I knew was a dream. Chris and I were
swimming at White's Beach, a gravel-pit in Brunswick that had been turned
into a miniature lake when the gravel-diggers struck water. It was where
Teddy had seen the kid hit his head and almost drown.
In my dream we were out over our heads, stroking lazily along, with a
hot July sun blazing down. From behind us, on the float, came cries and
shouts and yells of laughter as kids climbed and dived or climbed and were
pushed. I could hear the empty kerosene drums that held the float up
clanging and booming together- a sound not unlike that of churchbeils,
which are so solemn and emptily profound. On the sand-and-gravel beach,
oiled bodies lay face down on blankets, little kids with buckets squatted on
the verge of the water or sat happily flipping muck into their hair with
plastic shovels, and teenagers clustered in grinning groups, watching the
young girls promenade endlessly back and forth in pairs and trios, never
alone, the secret places of their bodies wrapped in Jantzen tank suits. People
walked up the hot sand on the balls of their feet, wincing, to the snackbar.
They came back with chips, Devil Dogs, Red Ball Popsicles.
Mrs. Cote drifted past us on an inflatable rubber raft. She was lying on
her back, dressed in her typical September-to-June school uniform: a grey
two-piece suit with a thick sweater instead of a blouse under the jacket, a
flower pinned over one almost nonexistent breast, thick support hose the
colour of Canada Mints on her legs. Her black old lady's high-heeled shoes
were trailing in the water, making small Vs. Her hair was blue-rinsed, like
my mother's, and done up in those tight, medicinal-smelling clockspring
curls. Her glasses flashed brutally in the sun.
'Watch your steps, boys,' she said. 'Watch your steps or I'll hit you hard
enough to strike you blind. I can do that; I have been given that power by
the school board. Now, Mr. Chambers, "Mending Wall", if you please. By
rote.'
'I tried to give the money back,' Chris said. 'Old lady Simons said okay,
but she took it!
Do you hear me? She took it! Now what are you going to do about it?
Are you going to whack her blind?'
' "Mending Wall," Mr. Chambers, if you please. By rote.' Chris threw me
a despairing glance, as if to say Didn't I tell you it would be this way?, and
then began to tread water.
He began.' "Something there is that doesn't love a wall, that sends the
frozen groundswell under it -"' And then his head went under, his reciting
mouth filling with water. He popped back up, crying: 'Help me, Gordie!
Help me!' Then he was dragged under again. Looking into the clear water I
could see two bloated, naked corpses holding his ankles. One was Vern and
the other was Teddy, and their open eyes were as blank and pupilless as the
eyes of Greek statues. Their small pre-pubescent penises floated limply up
from their distended bellies like albino strands of kelp. Chris's head broke
water again. He held one hand up limply to me and voiced a screaming,
womanish cry that rose and rose, ululating in the hot sunny summer air. I
looked wildly towards the beach but nobody had heard. The lifeguard, his
bronzed, athletic body lolling attractively on the seat at the top of his
whitewashed cruciform wooden tower, just went on smiling down at a girl
in a red bathing suit. Chris's scream turned into a bubbling waterchoked
gurgle as the corpses pulled him under again. And as they dragged him
down to black water I could see his rippling, distorted eyes turned up to me
in pleading agony; I could see his white starfish hands held helplessly up to
the sun-burnished roof of the water. But instead of diving down and trying
to save him, I stroked madly for the shore, or at least to a place where the
water would not be over my head. Before I could get there-before I could
even get close -I felt a soft, rotted, implacable hand wrap itself around my
calf and begin to pull. A scream built up in my chest but before I could
utter it, the dream washed away into a grainy facsimile of reality. It was
Teddy with his hand on my leg. He was shaking me awake. It was my
watch.
Still half in the dreams, almost talking in my sleep, I asked him thickly:
'You alive, Teddy?'
'No. I'm dead and you're a black nigger,' he said crossly. It dispelled the
last of the dream. I sat up by the campfire and Teddy lay down.
20
The others slept heavily through the rest of the night. I was in and out,
dozing, waking, dozing again. The night was far from silent; I heard the
triumphant screech-squawk of a pouncing owl, the tiny cry of some small
animal perhaps about to be eaten, a larger something blundering wildly
through the undergrowth. Under all of this, a steady tone, were the crickets.
There were no more screams. I dozed and woke, woke and dozed, and I
suppose if I had been discovered standing such a slipshod watch in Le Dio,
I probably would have been court-martialed and shot.
I snapped more solidly out of my last doze and became aware that
something was different. It took a moment or two to figure it out: although
the moon was down, I could see my hands resting on my jeans. My watch
said quarter to five. It was dawn. I stood, hearing my spine crackle, walked
two dozen feet away from the lumped-together bodies of my friends, and
pissed into a clump of sumac. I was starting to shake the night-willies; I
could feel them sliding away. It was a fine feeling.
I scrambled up the cinders to the railroad tracks and sat on one of the
rails, idly chucking cinders between my feet, in no hurry to wake the others.
At that precise moment the new day felt too good to share.
Morning came on apace. The noise of the crickets began to drop, and the
shadows under the trees and bushes evaporated like puddles after a shower.
The air had that peculiar lack of taste that presages the latest hot day in a
famous series of hot days. Birds that had maybe cowered all night just as
we had done now began to twitter self-importantly. A wren landed on top of
the deadfall from which we had taken our firewood, preened itself, and then
flew off.
I don't know how long I sat there on that rail, watching the purple steal
out of the sky as noiselessly as it had stolen in the evening before. Long
enough for my butt to start complaining, anyway. I was about to get up
when I looked to my right and saw a deer standing in the railroad bed not
ten yards from me.
My heart went up into my throat so high that I think I could have put my
hand in my mouth and touched it. My stomach and genitals filled with a
hot, dry excitement. I didn't move. I couldn't have moved if I wanted to. Her
eyes weren't brown but a dark, dusty black-the kind of velvet you see
backgrounding jewellery displays. Her small ears were scuffed suede. She
looked serenely at me, head slightly lowered in what I took for curiosity,
seeing a kid with his hair in a sleep-scarecrow of whirls and many-tined
cowlicks, wearing jeans with cuffs and a brown khaki shirt with the elbows
mended and the collar turned up in the hoody tradition of the day. What I
was seeing was some sort of gift, something given with a carelessness that
was appalling.
We looked at each other for a long time I think it was a long time. Then
she turned and walked off to the other side of the tracks, white bobtail
flipping insouciantly. She found grass and began to crop. I couldn't believe
it. She had begun to crop. She didn't look back at me and didn't need to; I
was frozen solid.
Then the rail started to thrum under my ass and bare seconds later the
doe's head came up, cocked back towards Castle Rock. She stood there, her
branch-black nose working on the air, coaxing it a little. Then she was gone
in three gangling leaps, vanishing into the woods with no sound but one
rotted branch, which broke with a sound like a track ref s starter-gun.
I sat there, looking mesmerized at the spot where she had been, until the
actual sound of the freight came up through the stillness. Then I skidded
back down the bank to where the others were sleeping.
The freight's slow, loud passage woke them up, yawning and scratching.
There was some funny, nervous talk about 'the case of the screaming ghost',
as Chris called it, but not as much as you might imagine. In daylight it
seemed more foolish than interesting-almost embarrassing. Best forgotten.
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell them about the deer, but I ended up
not doing it. That was one thing I kept to myself. I've never spoken or
written of it until just now, today. And I have to tell you that it seems a
lesser thing written down, damn near inconsequential. But for me it was the
best part of that trip, the cleanest part, and it was a moment I found myself
returning to, almost helplessly, when there was trouble in my life-my first
day in the bush in Viet Nam, and this fellow walked into the clearing where
we were with his hand over his nose and when he took his hand away there
was no nose there because it had been shot off; the time the doctor told us
our youngest son might be hydrocephalic (he turned out just to have an
oversized
head, thank God); the long, crazy weeks before my mother died. I would
find my thoughts turning back to that morning, the scuffed suede of her
ears, the white flash of her tail. But five hundred million Red Chinese don't
give a shit, right? The most important things are the hardest to say, because
words diminish them. It's hard to make strangers care about the good things
in your life.
21
The tracks now bent south-west and ran through tangles of second-
growth fir and heavy underbrush. We got a breakfast of late blackberries
from some of these bushes, but berries never fill you up; your stomach just
gives them a thirty-minute option and then begins growling again. We went
back to the tracks-it was about eight o'clock by then-and took five. Our
mouths were a dark purple and our naked torsos were scratched from the
blackberry brambles. Vern wished glumly aloud for a couple of fried eggs
with bacon on the side.
That was the last day of the heat, and I think it was the worst of all. The
early scud of clouds melted away and by nine o'clock the sky was a pale
steel colour that made you feel hotter just looking at it The sweat rolled and
ran from our chests and backs, leaving clean streaks through the
accumulated soot and grime. Mosquitoes and blackflies whirled and dipped
around our heads in aggravating clouds. Knowing that we had eight, maybe
ten miles to go didn't make us feel any better. Yet the fascination of the
thing drew us on and kept us walking faster than we had any business
doing, in that heat. We were all crazy to see that kid's body -I can't put it
any more simply or honestly than that. Whether it was harmless or whether
it turned out to have the power to murder sleep with a hundred mangled
dreams, we wanted to see it. I think that we had come to believe we
deserved to see it.
It was about nine-thirty when Teddy and Chris spotted water up ahead-
they shouted to Vern and me. We ran over to where they were standing.
Chris was laughing, delighted.
'Look there! Beavers did that!' He pointed.
It was the work of beavers, all right. A large-bore culvert ran under the
railroad embankment a little way ahead, and the beavers had sealed the
right end with one of their neat and industrious little dams-sticks and
branches cemented together with leaves, twigs, and dried mud. Beavers are
busy little fuckers, all right Behind the dam was a clear and shining pool of
water, brilliantly mirroring the sunlight Beaver houses humped up and out
of the water in several places-they looked like wooden igloos. A small
creek trickled into the far end of the pool, and the trees which bordered it
were gnawed a clean bone-white to a height of almost three feet in places.
'Railroad'll clean this shit out pretty soon,' Chris said.
'Why?' Vern asked.
"They can't have a pool here,' Chris said, 'it'd undercut their previous
railroad line. That's why they put that culvert in there to start with. They'll
shoot them some beavers and scare off the rest and then knock out their
dam. Then this'll go back to being a bog, like it probably was before.'
'I think that eats the meat,' Teddy said.
Chris shrugged. 'Who cares about beavers? Not the Great Western and
Southern Maine, that's for sure.'
'You think it's deep enough to swim in?' Vern asked, looking hungrily at
the
water.
'One way to find out,' Teddy said.
'Who goes first?' I asked.
'Me!' Chris said. He went running down the bank, kicking off his
sneakers and untying his shirt from around his waist with a jerk. He pushed
his pants and undershorts down with a single shove of his thumbs. He
balanced, first on one leg and them on the other, to get his socks. Then he
made a shallow dive. He came up shaking his head to get his wet hair out of
his eyes. 'It's fuckin' great!' he shouted.
'How deep?' Teddy called back. He had never learned to swim.
Chris stood up in the water and his shoulders broke the surface. I saw
something on one of them- a blackish-greyish something. I decided it was a
piece of mud and dismissed it.
If I had looked more closely I could have saved myself a lot of
nightmares later on.
'Come on in, you chickens!'
He turned and thrashed off across the pool in a clumsy breast-stroke,
turned over, and thrashed back. By then we were all getting undressed. Vern
was in next, then me.
Hitting the water was fantastic-clean and cool. I swam across to Chris,
loving the silky feel of having nothing on but water. I stood up and we
grinned into each other's faces.
'Boss!' We said it at exactly the same instant.
'Fuckin' jerkoff,' he said, splashed water in my face, and swam off the
other
way.
We goofed off in the water for almost half an hour before we realized that
the pond was full of bloodsuckers. We dived, swam under water, ducked
each other. We never knew a thing. Then Vern swam into the shallower part,
went under, and stood on his hands.
When his legs broke water in a shaky but triumphant V, I saw that they
were covered with blackish-grey lumps, just like the one I had seen on
Chris's shoulder. They were slugs-big ones.
Chris's mouth dropped open, and I felt all the blood in my body go as
cold as
dry ice.
Teddy screamed, his face going Dale. Then all three of us were thrashing
for the bank, going just as fast as we could. I know more about freshwater
slugs now than I did then, but the fact that they are mostly harmless has
done nothing to allay the almost insane horror of them I've had ever since
that day in the beaver-pool. They carry a local anaesthetic and an
anticoagulant in their alien saliva, which means that the host never feels a
thing when they attach themselves. If you don't happen to see them they'll
go on feeding until their swelled, loathsome bodies fall off you, sated, or
until they actually burst.
We pulled ourselves up on the bank and Teddy went into a hysterical
paroxysm as he looked down at himself. He was screaming as he picked the
leeches off his naked body.
Vern broke the water and looked at us, puzzled. 'What the hell's wrong
with hi
'Leeches!' Teddy screamed, pulling two of them off his rrembling thighs
and throwing them just as far as he could. Dirty motherfuckin'
bloodsuckers!' His voice broke shrilly on the last word.
'OhGodOhGodOhGod!' Vern cried. He paddled across the pool and
stumbled
out.
I was still cold; the heat of the day had been suspended. I kept telling
myself to catch hold. Not to get screaming. Not to be a pussy. I picked half
a dozen off my arms and several more off my chest.
Chris turned his back to me. 'Gordie? Are there any more? Take 'em off if
there are, please, Gordie!' There were more, five or six, running down his
back like grotesque black buttons. I pulled their soft, boneless bodies off
him.
I brushed even more off my legs, then got Chris to do my back.
I was starting to relax a little and that was when I looked down at
myself and saw the granddaddy of them all clinging to my testicles, its body
swelled to four times its normal size. Its blackish-grey skin had gone a
bruised purplish-red. That was when I began to lose control. Not outside, at
least not in any big way, but inside, where it counts. I brushed its slick,
glutinous body with the back of my hand. It held on. I tried to do it again
and couldn't bring myself to actually touch it I turned to Chris, tried to
speak, couldn't I pointed instead. His cheeks, already ashy, went whiter still.
'I can't get it off,' I said through numb lips. 'You can you'
But he backed away, shaking his head, his mouth twisted 'I can't, Gordie,'
he said, unable to take his eyes away. 'I'm sorry but I can't No. Oh. No.' He
turned away, bowed with one hand pressed to his midsection like the butler
in a musical comedy, and was sick in a stand of juniper bushes.
You got to hold onto yourself, I thought, looking at the leech that hung
off me like a crazy beard. Its body was still visibly swelling. You got to
hold onto yourself and get him. Be tough. It's the last one. The. Last. One.
I reached down again and picked it off and it burst between my fingers.
My own blood ran across my palm and inner wrist in a warm flood. I began
to cry. Still crying, I walked back to my clothes and put them or. I wanted to
stop crying, but I just didn't seem able to turn off the waterworks. Then the
shakes set in, making it worse. Vern ran up to me, still naked. 'They off,
Gordie? They off me? They off me?' He twirled in front of me like an
insane dancer on carnival stage. They off? Huh? Huh? They off me,
Gordie?'
His eyes kept going past me, as wide and white as the eyes of a plaster
horse on a merry-go-round.
I nodded that they were and just kept on crying. It seemed that crying
was going to be my new career. I tucked my shirt in and then buttoned it all
the way to the neck. I put on my socks and my sneakers. Little by little the
tears began to slow down. Finally there was nothing left but a few hitches
and moans, and then they stopped, too. Chris walked over to me, wiping his
mouth with a handful of elm leaves. His eyes were wide and mute and
apologetic.
When we were all dressed we just stood there looking at each other for a
moment, and then we began to climb the railroad embankment. I looked
back once at the burst leech lying on top of the tramped-down bushes where
we had danced and screamed and groaned them off. It looked deflated but
still ominous.
Fourteen years later I sold my first novel and made my first trip to New
York. 'It's going to be a three-day celebration,' my new editor told me over
the phone. 'People slinging bullshit will be summarily shot' But of course it
was three days of unmitigated bullshit. I went away thinking the publishing
house believed me to be the
reincarnation of Thomas Wolfe; they saw me off with perhaps other
things in mind-paperback sales in the millions, for instance.
While I was there I wanted to do all the standard out-of-towner things-see
a stage show at Radio City Music Hall, go to the top of the Empire State
Building (fuck the World Trade Center; the building King Kong climbed in
1933 is always gonna be the tallest one in the world for me), visit Times
Square by night. Keith, my editor, seemed more than pleased to show his
city off. The last touristy thing we did was to take a ride on the Staten
Island Ferry, and while leaning on the rail I happened to look down and see
scores of used condoms floating on the mild swells. And I had a moment of
almost total recall-or perhaps it was an actual incidence of time-travel.
Either way, for one second I was Literally in the past, pausing halfway up
that embankment and looking back at the burst leech: dead, deflated but
still ominous.
Keith must have seen something in my face because he said: 'Not very
pretty, are they?'
I only shook my head, wanting to tell him not to apologize, wanting to
tell him that you didn't have to come to the Apple and ride the ferry to see
used rubbers, wanting to say: The only reason anyone writes stories is so
they can understand the past and get ready for some future mortality; that's
why all the verbs in stories have ed endings, Keith my good man, even the
ones that sell millions of paperbacks. The only two useful artforms are
religion and stories.
I was pretty drunk that night, as you may have guessed.
What I did tell him was: 'I was thinking of something else, that's all.' The
most important things are the hardest things to say.
22
We walked further down the tracks- I don't know just how far-and I was
starting to think: Well, okay, I'm going to be able to handle it, it's all over
anyway, just a bunch of leeches, what the fuck; I was still thinking it when
waves of whiteness suddenly began to come over my sight and I fell down.
I must have fallen hard, but landing on the crossties was like plunging
into a warm and puffy feather bed. Someone turned me over. The touch of
hands was faint and unimportant. Their faces were disembodied balloons
looking down at me from miles up.
They looked the way the ref s face must look to a fighter who has been
punched silly and is currently taking a ten-second rest on the canvas. Their
words came in gentle oscillations, fading in and out ' him?'
' be all '
' if you think the sun'
'Gordie, are you '
Then I must have said something that didn't make much sense because
they began to look really worried.
'We better take him back, man,' Teddy said, and then the whiteness came
over everything again.
When it cleared, I seemed to be all right Chris was squatting next to me,
saying: 'Can you hear me, Gordie? You there, man?'
'Yes,' I said, and sat up. A swarm of black dots exploded in front of my
eyes, and then went away. I waited to see if they'd come back, and when
they didn't, I stood
uP.
'You scared the cheesly old shit outta me, Gordie,' he said. 'You want a
drink of water?'
'Yeah.'
He gave me his canteen, half-full of water, and I let three warm gulps roll
down my throat 'Why'd you faint, Gordie?' Vern asked anxiously. 'Made a
bad mistake and looked at your face,' I said. 'Eeee-eee-eeeee!' Teddy
cackled. 'Fuckin' Gordie! You wet!' 'You really okay?' Vern persisted.
'Yeah. Sure. It was bad there for a minute. Thinking about those
suckers.' They nodded soberly. We took five in the shade and then went on
walking, me and Vern on one side of the tracks again, Chris and Teddy on
the other. We figured we must be getting close.
23
We weren't as close as we thought, and if we'd had the brains to spend
two minutes looking at a roadmap, we would have seen why. We knew that
Ray Brewer's corpse had to be near the Back Harlow Road, which dead-
ends on the bank of the Royal River. Another trestle carries the GS&WM
tracks across the Royal. So this is the way we figured: Once we got close to
the Royal, we'd be getting close to the Back Harlow Road, where Billy and
Charlie had been parked when they saw the boy. And since the Royal was
only ten miles from the Castle River, we figured we had it made in the
shade. But that was ten miles as the crow flies, and the tracks didn't move
on a straight line between the Castle and the Royal. Instead, they made a
very shallow loop to avoid a hilly, crumbling region called The Bluffs.
Anyway, we could have seen that loop quite clearly if we had looked on a
map, and figured out that instead of ten miles, we had about sixteen to walk.
Chris began to suspect the truth when noon had come and gone and the
Royal still wasn't in sight. We stopped while he climbed a high pine tree
and took a look around. He came down and gave us a simple enough report:
it was going to be at least four in the afternoon before we got to the Royal,
and we would only make it by then if we humped right along. 'Ah, shit!'
Teddy cried. 'So what're we gonna do now?'
We looked into each other's tired, sweaty faces. We were hungry and out
of temper. The big adventure had turned into a long slog-dirty and
sometimes scary. We would have been missed back home by now, too, and
if Milo Pressman hadn't already called the cops on us, the engineer of the
train crossing the trestle might have done it. We had been planning to
hitchhike back to Castle Rock, but four o'clock was just three hours from
dark, and nobody gives four kids on a back country road a lift after dark. I
tried to summon up the cool image of my deer, cropping at green morning
grass, but even that seemed dusty and no good, no better than a stuffed
trophy over the mantle in some guy's hunting lodge, the eyes sprayed to
give them that phony lifelike shine. Finally Chris said: 'It's still closer going
ahead. Let's go.'
He turned and started to walk along the tracks in his dusty sneakers, head
down, his shadow only a puddle at his feet. After a minute or so the rest of
us followed him, strung out in Indian file.
24
In the years between then and the writing of this memoir, I've thought
remarkably little about those two days in September, at least consciously.
The associations the memories bring to the surface are as unpleasant as
week-old river corpses brought to the surface by cannonfire. As a result, I
never really questioned our decision to walk down the tracks. Put another
way, I've wondered sometimes about what we had decided to do but never
about how we did it. But now a much simpler scenario comes to mind. I'm
confident that if the idea had come up it would have been shot down-
walking down the tracks would have seemed neater, bosser, as we said then.
But if the idea had come up and hadn't been shot down in flames, none of
the things which occurred later would have happened. Maybe Chris and
Teddy and Vern would even be alive today. No, they didn't die in the woods
or on the railroad tracks; nobody dies in this story except some
bloodsuckers and Ray Brower, and if you want to be completely fair about
it, he was dead before it even started. But it is true that, of the four of us
who flipped coins to see who would go down to the Florida Market to get
supplies, only the one who actually went is still alive. The Ancient Mariner
at thirty-four, with you, Gentle Reader, in the role of wedding guest (at this
point shouldn't you flip to the jacket photo to see if my eye holdeth you in
its spell?) If you sense a certain flipness on my part, you're right-but
maybe I have cause. At an age when all four of us would be considered too
young and immature to be President, three of us are dead. And if small
events really do echo up larger and larger through time, yes, maybe if we
had done the simple thing and simply hitched into Harlow, they would still
be alive today. We could have hooked a ride all the way up Route 7 to the
Shiloh Church, which stood at the intersection of the highway and the Back
Harlow Road (at least until 1967, when it was levelled by a fire attributed to
a tramp's smouldering cigarette butt). With reasonable luck we could have
been beating the bushes in the area where Billy and Charlie parked with
their skag girlfriends before sundown of the previous day.
But the idea wouldn't have lived. It wouldn't have been shot down with
tightly buttressed arguments and debating society rhetoric, but with grunts
and scowls and farts and raised middle fingers. The verbal part of the
discussion would have been carried forward with such trenchant and
sparkling contributions as 'Fuck no', 'That sucks', and that old reliable
standby, 'Did your mother ever have any kids that lived?'
Unspoken-maybe it was too fundamental to be spoken -was the idea that
this was a big thing. It wasn't screwing around with firecrackers or trying to
look through the knothole in the back of the girls' privy at Harrison State
Park. This was something on a par with getting laid for the first time, or
going into the Army, or buying your first bottle of legal liquor-just bopping
into that state store, if you can dig it, selecting a bottle of good Scotch,
showing the clerk your draft card and drivers' licence, then walking out with
a grin on your face and that brown bag in your hand, member of a club with
just a few more rights and privileges than our old treehouse with the tin
roof.
There's a high ritual to all fundamental events, the rites of passage, the
magic corridor where the change happens. Buying the condoms. Standing
before the minister. Raising your hand and taking the oath. Or, if you
please, walking down the railroad tracks to meet a fellow your own age
halfway, the same as I'd walk halfway up Grand Street to meet Chris if he
was coming over to my house, or the way Teddy would walk halfway down
Gates Street to meet me if I was going to his. It seemed right to do it this
way, because the rite of passage is a magic corridor and so we always
provide an aisle-it's what you walk down when you get married, what they
carry you down when you get buried. Our corridor was those twin rails, and
we walked between them, just bopping along towards whatever this was
supposed to mean. You don't hitchhike your way to a thing like that, maybe.
And maybe we thought it was also right that it should have turned out to
be harder than we had expected. Events surrounding our hike had turned it
into what we had suspected it was all along: serious business.
What we didn't know as we walked around The Bluffs was that Billy
Tessio, Charlie Hogan, Jack Mudgett, Norman 'Fuzzy' Brackowicz, Vince
Desjardins, Chris's older brother Eyeball, and Ace Merrill himself were all
on their way to take a look at the body themselves-in a weird kind of way,
Ray Brower had become famous, and our secret had turned into a regular
roadshow. They were piling into Ace's chopped and channelled '52 Ford
and Vince's pink '54 Studebaker even as we started on the last leg of our
trip. Billy and Charlie had managed to keep their enormous secret for just
about twenty-four hours. Then Charlie spilled it to Ace while they were
shooting pool, and Billy had spilled it to Jack Mudgett while they were
fishing for steelies from the Boom Road bridge. Both Ace and Jack had
sworn solemnly on their mothers' names to keep the secret, and that was
how everybody in their gang knew about it by noon. Guess you could tell
what those assholes thought about their mothers.
They all congregated down at the pool hall, and Fuzzy Brackowicz
advanced a theory (which you have heard before, Gentle Reader) that they
could all become heroes-not to mention instant radio and TV personalities-
by 'discovering' the body. All they had to do, Fuzzy maintained, was to take
two cars with a lot of fishing gear in the trunks. After they found the body,
their story would be a hundred per cent. We was just plannin' to take a few
pickerel out of the Royal River, officer. Heh-heh-heh. Look what we found.
They were burning up the road from Castle Rock to the Back Harlow area
just as we started to finally get close.
25
Clouds began to build in the sky around two o'clock, but at first none of
us took them seriously. It hadn't rained since the early days of July, so why
should it rain now? But they kept building to the south of us, up and up and
up, thunderheads in great pillars as purple as bruises, and they began to
move slowly our way. I looked at them closely, checking for that membrane
beneath that means it's already raining twenty miles away, or fifty. But there
was no rain yet. The clouds were still just building.
Vern got a blister on his heel and we stopped and rested while he packed
the back of his left sneaker with moss stripped from the bark of an old oak
tree.
'Is it gonna rain, Gordie?' Teddy asked.
'I think so.'
'Pisser!' he said, and sighed. 'The pisser good end to a pisser good day.'
I laughed and he tipped me a wink.
We started to walk again, a little more slowly now out of respect for
Vern's hurt foot.
And in the hour between two and three, the quality of the day's light
began to change, and we knew for sure that rain was coming. It was just as
hot as ever, and even more humid, but we knew. And the birds did. They
seemed to appear from nowhere and swoop across the sky, chattering and
crying shrilly to each other. And the light. From a steady, beating brightness
it seemed to evolve into something filtered, almost pearly. Our shadows,
which had begun to grow long again, also grew fuzzy and ill-defined. The
sun had begun to sail in and out through the thickening decks of clouds, and
the southern sky had gone a copper shade. We watched the thunderheads
lumber closer, fascinated by their size and their mute threat. Every now and
then it seemed that a giant flashbulb had gone off inside one of them,
turning their purplish, bruised colour momentarily to a light grey. I saw a
jagged fork of lightning lick down from the underside of the closest. It was
bright enough to print a blue tattoo on my retinas. It was followed by a
long, shaking blast of thunder.
We did a little bitching about how we were going to get caught out in the
rain, but only because it was the expected thing-of course we were all
looking forward to it. It would be cold and refreshing and leech-free.
At a little past three-thirty, we saw running water through a break in the
trees.
"That's it!' Chris yelled jubilantly. That's the Royal!'
We began to walk faster, taking our second wind. The storm was getting
close now. The air began to stir, and it seemed that the temperature dropped
ten degrees in a space of seconds. I looked down and saw that my shadow
had disappeared entirely.
We were walking in pairs again, each two watching a side of the railroad
embankment.
My mouth was dry, throbbing with a sickish tension. The sun sailed
behind another cloudbank and this time it didn't come back out. For a
moment the bank's edges were embroidered with gold, like a cloud hi an
Old Testament Bible illustration, and then the wine-coloured, dragging
belly of the thunderhead blotted out all traces of the sun. The day became
gloomy-the clouds were rapidly eating up the last of the blue. We could
smell the river so clearly that we might have been horses-or perhaps it was
the smell of rain impending in the air as well. There was an ocean above us,
held in by a thin sac that might rupture and let down a flood at any second.
I kept trying to look into the underbrush, but my eyes were continually
drawn back to that turbulent, racing sky; in its deepening colours you could
read whatever doom you liked: water, fire, wind, hail. The cool breeze
became more insistent, hissing in the firs. A sudden impossible bolt of
lightning flashed down, seemingly from directly overhead, making me cry
out and clap my hands to my eyes. God had taken my picture, a little kid
with his shirt tied around his waist, duckbumps on his bare chest and
cinders on his cheeks. I heard the rending fall of some big tree not sixty
yards away. The crack of thunder which followed made me cringe. I wanted
to be at home reading a good book in a safe place like down in the potato
cellar.
'Jeezis!' Vern screamed in a high, fainting voice. 'Oh my Jeezis Chrise,
lookit
that!'
I looked in the direction Vern was pointing and saw a blue-white fireball
bowling its way up the lefthand rail of the GS&WM tracks, crackling and
hissing for all the world like a scalded cat. It hurried past us as we turned to
watch it go,
dumbfounded, aware for the first time that such things could exist.
Twenty feet beyond us it made a sudden -pop!!-and just disappeared,
leaving a greasy smell of ozone behind.
'What am I doin' here, anyway?' Teddy muttered.
'What a pisser!' Chris exclaimed happily, his face upturned. This is gonna
be a pisser like you wouldn't believer But I was with Teddy. Looking up at
that sky gave me a dismaying sense of vertigo. It was more like looking into
some deeply mysterious marbled gorge.
Another lightning-bolt crashed down, making us duck. This time the
ozone smell was hotter, more urgent. The following clap of thunder came
with no perceptible pause at all.
My ears were still ringing from it when Vern began to screech
triumphantly: 'THERE! THERE HE IS! RIGHT THERE! I SEE HIM!'
I can see Vern right this minute, if I want to-all I have to do is sit back for
a minute and close my eyes. He's standing there on the lefthand rail like an
explorer on the prow of his ship, one hand shielding his eyes from the silver
stroke of lightning that has just come down, the other extended and
pointing.
We ran up beside him and looked. I was thinking to myself: Vern's
imagination just ran away with him, that's all. The suckers, the heat, now
this storm his eyes are dealing wild cards, that's all. But that wasn't what it
was, although there was a split second when I wanted it to be. In that split
second I knew I never wanted to see a corpse, not even a runover
woodchuck.
In the place where we were standing, early spring rains had washed part
of the embankment away, leaving a gravelly, uncertain four-foot drop-off.
The railroad maintenance crews either not yet gotten around to it in their
yellow diesel-operated repair carts, or it had happened so recently it hadn't
yet been reported. At the bottom of this washout was a marshy, mucky
tangle of undergrowth that smelled bad. And sticking out of a wild
clockspring of blackberry brambles was a single pale white hand.
Did any of us breathe? I didn't.
The breeze was now a wind-harsh and jerky, coming at us from no
particular direction, jumping and whirling, slapping at our sweaty skins and
open pores. I hardly noticed. I think part of my mind was waiting for Teddy
to cry out Paratroops over the side!, and I thought if he did that I might just
go crazy. It would have been better to see the whole body, all at once, but
instead there was only that limp outstretched hand, horribly white, the
fingers limply splayed, like the hand of a drowned boy. It told us the truth
of the whole matter. It explained every graveyard in the world. The image
of that hand came back to me every time I heard or read of an atrocity.
Somewhere, attached to that hand, was the rest of Ray Brower.
Lightning flickered and stroked. Thunder ripped in behind each stroke as
if a drag race had started over our heads.
'Sheeeee' Chris said, the sound not quite a cuss word, not quite the
country version of shit as it is pronounced around a slender stem of timothy
grass when the baler breaks down-instead it was a long, tuneless syllable
without meaning; a sigh that had just happened to pass through the vocal
cords.
Vern was licking his lips in a compulsive sort of way, as if he had tasted
some obscure new delicacy, a Howard Johnson's 29th Flavour, Tibetan
Sausage Rolls, Interstellar Escargot, something so weird that it excited and
revolted him at the same time.
Teddy only stood and looked. The wind whipped his greasy, clotted hair
first away from his ears and then back over them. His face was a total
blank. I could tell you I saw something there, and perhaps I did, in
hindsight but not then.
There were black ants trundling back and forth across the hand.
A great whispering noise began to rise in the woods on either side of the
tracks, as if the forest had just noticed we were there and was commenting
on it. The rain had started.
Dime-sized drops fell on my head and arms. They struck the
embankment, turning the fill dark for a moment-and then the colour
changed back again as the greedy dry ground sucked the moisture up.
Those big drops fell for maybe five seconds and then they stopped. I
looked at Chris and he blinked back at me.
Then the storm came all at once, as if a shower chain had been pulled in
the sky. The whispering sound changed to loud contention. It was as if we
were being rebuked for our discovery, and it was frightening. Nobody tells
you about the pathetic fallacy until you're in college and even then I
noticed that nobody but the total dorks completely believed it was a fallacy.
Chris jumped over the side of the washout, his hair already soaked and
clinging to his head. I followed. Vern and Teddy came close behind, but
Chris and I were first to reach the body of Ray Brower. He was face down.
Chris looked into my eyes, his face set and stern-an adult's face. I nodded
slightly, as if he had spoken aloud. I think he was down here and relatively
intact instead of up there between the rails and completely mangled because
be was trying to get out of the way when the train hit him, knocking him
head over heels. He had landed with his head pointed towards the tracks,
arms over his head like a diver about to execute. He had landed in this
boggy cup of land that was becoming a small swamp. His hair was a dark
reddish colour. The moisture in the air had made it curl slightly at the ends.
There was blood in it, but not a great deal, not a gross-out amount. The ants
were grosser. He was wearing a solid colour dark green tee-shirt and
bluejeans. His feet were bare, and a few feet behind him, caught in the
blackberry brambles, I saw a pair of filthy low-topped Keds. For a moment
I was puzzled-why was he here and his tennies there Then I realized, and
the realization was like a dirty punch below the belt. My wife, my kids, my
friends-they all think that having an imagination like mine must be quite
nice; aside from making all this dough, I can have a little mind-movie
whenever things get dull. Mostly they're right. But every now and then it
turns around and bites the shit out of you with these long teeth, teeth that
have been filed to points like the teeth of a cannibal. You see things you'd
just as soon not see, things that keep you awake until first light. I saw one
of those things now, saw it with absolute clarity and certainty. He had been
knocked spang out of his Keds. The train had knocked him out of his Keds
just as it had knocked the life out of his body. That finally rammed it all the
way home for me. The kid was dead. The kid wasn't sick, the kid wasn't
sleeping. The kid wasn't going to get up in the morning anymore or get the
runs from eating too many apples or catch poison ivy or wear out the eraser
on the end of his Ticonderoga No. 2 during a hard math test. The kid was
dead; stone dead. The kid was never going to go out bottling with his
friends in the spring, gunnysack over his shoulder to pick up the returnables
the retreating snow uncovered. The kid wasn't going to wake up at two
o'clock a. m. on the morning of 1 November this year, run to the bathroom,
and vomit up a big glurt of cheap Halloween candy. The kid wasn't going to
pull a single girl's braid in home room. The kid wasn't going to give a
bloody nose, or get one. The kid was can't, don't, won't, never, shouldn't,
wouldn't, couldn't. He was the side of the
battery where the terminal says NEG. The fuse you have to put a penny
in. The wastebasket by the teacher's desk, which always smells of wood-
shavings from the sharpener and dead orange-peels from lunch. The
haunted house outside of town where the windows are crashed out, the NO
TRESPASSING signs whipped away across the fields, the attic full of bats,
the cellar full of worms. The kid was dead, mister, ma'am, young sir, little
miss. I could go on all day and never get it right about the distance between
his bare feet on the ground and his dirty Keds hanging in the bushes. It was
thirty-plus inches, it was a googol of light-years. The kid was disconnected
from his Keds beyond all hope of reconciliation. He was dead.
We turned him face up into the pouring rain, the lightning, the steady
crack of thunder. There were ants and bugs all over his face and neck. They
ran briskly in and out of the round collar of his tee-shirt. His eyes were
open, but terrifyingly out of sync-one was rolled back so far that we could
see only a tiny arc of pupil; the other stared straight up into the storm. There
was a dried froth of blood above his mouth and on his chin-from a bloody
nose, I thought-and the right side of his face was lacerated and darkly
bruised. Still, I thought, he didn't really look bad. I had once walked into a
door my brother Dennis was shoving open, came off with bruises even
worse than this kid's, plus the bloody nose, and still had two helpings of
everything for supper after it happened. Teddy and Vern stood behind us
and if there had been any sight at all left in that one upward-staring eye, I
suppose we would have looked to Ray Brower like pallbearers in a horror
movie.
A beetle came out of his mouth, trekked across his fuzzless cheek,
stepped onto a nettle, and was gone.
'Djoo see that?' Teddy asked in a high, strange, fainting voice. 'I bet he's
fuckin' fulla bugs! I bet his brains're-
'Shut up, Teddy,' Chris said, and Teddy did, looking relieved. Lightning
forked blue across the sky, making the boy's single eye light up. You could
almost believe he was glad to be found, and found by boys his own age. His
torso had swelled up and there was a faint gassy odour about him, like the
smell of old farts. I turned away, sure I was going to be sick, but my
stomach was dry, hard, steady. I suddenly rammed two fingers down my
throat, trying to make myself heave, needing to do it, as if I could sick it up
and get rid of it. But my stomach only hitched a little and then was steady
again.
The roaring downpour and the accompanying thunder had completely
covered the sound of cars approaching along the Back Harlow Road, which
lay bare yards beyond this boggy tangle. It likewise covered the crackle-
crunch of the underbrush as they blundered through it from the dead end
where they had parked.
And the first we knew of them was Ace Merrill's voice raised above the
tumult of the storm, saying: 'Well what the fuck do you know about this?'
26
We all jumped like we had been goosed and Vern cried out -he admitted
later that he thought, for just a second, that the voice had come from the
dead boy.
On the far side of the boggy patch, where the woods took up again,
masking the butt end of the road, Ace Merrill and Eyeball Chambers stood
together, half-obscured by a pouring grey curtain of rain. They were both
wearing red nylon high school jackets, the kind you can buy in the office if
you're a regular student, the same kind they give away free to varsity sports
players. Their da haircuts had been plastered back against their skulls and a
mixture of rainwater and Vitalis ran down their cheeks like ersatz tears.
'Sumbitch!' Eyeball said. That's my little brother!'
Chris was staring at Eyeball with his mouth open. His shirt, wet, limp
and dark, was still tied around his skinny middle. His pack, stained a darker
green by the rain, was hanging against his naked shoulderblades.
'You get away, Rich,' he said in a trembling voice. 'We found him. We got
dibs.'
'Fuck your dibs. We're gonna report 'im.'
'No you're not,' I said. I was suddenly furious with them, turning up this
way at the last minute. If we'd thought about it, we'd have known something
just like this was going to happen but this was one time, somehow, that the
older, bigger kids weren't going to steal it-to take something they wanted as
if by divine right, as if their easy way was the right way, the only way. They
had come in cars -I think that was what made me angriest. They had come
in cars. 'There's four of us, Eyeball. You just try.'
'Oh, we'll try, don't worry,' Eyeball said, and the trees shook behind him
and Ace, Charlie Hogan and Vern's brother Billy stepped through them,
cursing and wiping water out of their eyes. I felt a lead ball drop into my
belly. It grew bigger as Jack Mudgett and Fuzzy Brackowicz stepped out
behind Charlie and Billy. 'Here we all are,' Ace said, grinning. 'So you just -
'
'VERN!!' Billy Tessio cried in a terrible, accusing, my-justice-cometh-
and-that-right-early voice. He made a pair of dripping fists. 'You little
sonofawhore! You was under the porch! Cock-knocker!' Vern flinched.
Charlie Hogan waxed positively lyrical: 'You little keyhole-peeping cunt-
licking bungwipe! I ought to beat the living shit out of you!'
'Yeah? Well, try it!' Teddy brayed suddenly. His eyes were crazily alight
behind his rainspotted glasses. 'Come on, fightcha for 'im! Come on! Come
on, big men!' Billy and Charlie didn't need a second invitation. They started
forward together and Vern flinched again-no doubt visualizing the ghosts of
Beatings Past and Beatings Yet To Come. He flinched but hung tough. He
was with his friends, and we had been through a lot, and we hadn't got here
in a couple of cars.
But Ace held Billy and Charlie back, simply by touching each of them on
the shoulder. 'Now listen, you guys,' Ace said. He spoke patiently, just as if
we weren't all standing in a roaring rainstorm. 'There's more of us than there
are of you. We're bigger. We'll give you one chance to just blow away. I
don't give a fuck where. Just make like a tree and leave.' Chris's brother
giggled and Fuzzy clapped Ace on the back in appreciation of his great wit.
The Sid Caesar of the set.
'Cause we're takin' him.' Ace smiled gently, and you could imagine him
smiling that same gentle smile just before breaking his cue over the head of
some uneducated punk who had made the terrible mistake of lipping off
while Ace was lining up a shot. 'If you go, we'll take him. If you stay, well
beat the piss outta you and still take him. Besides,' he added, trying to gild
the thuggery with a little righteousness, 'Charlie and Billy found him, so it's
their dibs anyway.'
'They was chicken!' Teddy shot back. 'Vern told us about it! They was
fuckin' chicken right outta their fuckin' minds!' He screwed his face up into
a terrified, snivelling parody of Charlie Hogan.' "I wish we never boosted
that car! I wish we never went on no Back Harlow Road to whack off a
piece! Oh Billee, what are we gonna do? Oh Billee, I think I just made a
pile in my Fruit of the Looms! Oh Billee -"'
That's it,' Charlie said, starting forward again. His face was knotted with
rage and sullen embarrassment. 'Kid, whatever your name is, get ready to
reach down your fuckin' throat the next time you need to pick your nose.'
I looked wildly down at Ray Brower. He stared calmly up into the rain
with his one eye, below us but above it all. The thunder was still booming
steadily, but the rain had begun to slack off.
'What do you say, Gordie?' Ace asked. He was holding Charlie lightly by
the arm, the way an accomplished trainer would restrain a vicious dog. 'You
must have at least some of your brother's sense. Tell these guys to back off.
I'll let Charlie beat up the four eyes el punko a little bit and then we all go
about our business. What do you say?'
He was wrong to mention Denny. I had wanted to reason with him, to
point out what Ace knew perfectly well, that we had every right to take
Billy and Charlie's dibs since Vern had heard them giving said dibs away. I
wanted to tell him how Vern and I had almost gotten run down by a freight
train on the trestle which spans the Castle River. About Milo Pressman and
his fearless-if stupid-sidekick, Chopper the Wonder-Dog. About the
bloodsuckers, too. I guess all I really wanted to tell him was come on, Ace,
fair is fair.
You know that. But he had to bring Denny into it, and what I heard
coming out of my mouth instead of sweet reason was my own death
warrant: 'Suck my fat one, you cheap dime-store hood.'
Ace's mouth formed a perfect O of surprise-the expression was so
unexpectedly prissy that under other circumstances it would have been a
laff riot, so to speak. All of the others-on both sides of the bog-stared at me.
dumbfounded.
Then Teddy screamed gleefully: "That's telling 'im, Gordie! Oh boy! Too
cool!'
I stood numbly, unable to believe it. It was like some crazed understudy
had shot onstage at the critical moment and declaimed lines that weren't
even in the play. Telling a guy to suck was as bad as you could get without
resorting to his mother. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Chris had
unshouldered his knapsack and was digging into it frantically, but I didn't
get it-not then, anyway.
'Okay,' Ace said softly. 'Let's take 'em. Don't hurt nobody but the
Lachance kid. I'm gonna break both his fuckin' arms.'
I went dead cold. I didn't piss myself the way I had on the railroad trestle,
but it must have been because I had nothing inside to let out. He meant it,
you see; the years between then and now have changed my mind about a lot
of things, but not about that. When Ace said he was going to break both of
my arms, he absolutely meant it.
They started to walk towards us through the slackening rain. Jackie
Mudgett took a DeMano switchknife out of his pocket and hit the chrome.
Six inches of steel flicked out, dove-grey in the afternoon half-light Vern
and Teddy dropped suddenly into fighting crouches on either side of me.
Teddy did so eagerly, Vern with a desperate, cornered grimace on his face.
The big kids advanced in a line, their feet splashing through the bog,
which was now one big sludgy puddle because of the storm. The body of
Ray Brower lay at our feet like a waterlogged barrel. I got ready to fight
and that was when Chris fired the pistol he had hawked out of his old man's
dresser. KA-BLAM!
God, what a wonderful sound that was! Charlie Hogar jumped right up
into the air. Ace Merrill, who had been staring straight at me, now jerked
around and looked at Chris. His mouth made that O again. Eyeball looked
absolutely astounded.
'Hey, Chris, that's Daddy's,' he said. 'You're gonna get the tar whaled out
of
you -'
"That's nothing to what you'll get,' Chris said. His face was horribly pale,
and all the life in him seemed to have been sucked upward, into his eyes.
They blazed out of his face.
'Gordie was right, you're nothing but a bunch of cheap hoods. Vern and
Billy didn't want their fuckin' dibs and you all know it. We wouldn't have
walked way to fuck out here if they said they did. They just went someplace
and puked the story up and let Ace Merrill do their thinkin' for them.' His
voice rose to a scream. 'But you ain't gonna get him, do you hear me?
'Now listen,' Ace said. 'You better put that down before you take your
foot off with it. You ain't got the sack to shoot a woodchuck.' He began to
walk forward again, smiling his gentle smile as he came. 'You're just a
sawed-off pint-sized pissy-assed little runt and I'm gonna make you eat that
fuckin' gun.'
'Ace, if you don't stand still I'm going to shoot you. I swear to God.'
'You'll go to jayyy-ail' Ace crooned, not even hesitating. He was still
smiling. The others watched him with horrified fascination much the same
way as Teddy and Vern and I were looking at Chris. Ace Merrill was the
hardest case for miles around and I didn't think Chris could bluff him down.
And what did that leave? Ace didn't think a twelve-year-old punk would
actually shoot him. I thought he was wrong; I thought Chris would shoot
Ace before he let Ace take his father's pistol away from him. In those few
seconds I was sure there was going to be bad trouble, the worst I'd ever
known. Killing trouble, maybe. And all of it over who got dibs on a dead
body.
Chris said softly, with great regret: 'Where do you want it, Ace? Arm or
leg? I can't pick. You pick for me.' And Ace stopped.
27
His face sagged, and I saw sudden terror on it. It was Chris's tone rather
than his actual words, I think; the real regret that things were going to go
from bad to worse. If it was a bluff, it's still the best I've ever seen. The
other big kids were totally convinced; their faces were squinched up as if
someone had just touched a match to a cherry bomb with a short fuse.
Ace slowly got control of himself. The muscles in his face tightened
again, his lips pressed together, and he looked at Chris the way you'd look
at a man who has made a serious business proposition-to merge with your
company, or handle your line of credit, or shoot your balls off. It was a
waiting, almost curious expression, one that made you know that the terror
was either gone or tightly lidded. Ace had recomputed the odds on not
getting shot and had decided that they weren't as much in his favour as he
had thought. But he was still dangerous-maybe more than before. Since
then I've thought it was the rawest piece of brinkmanship I've ever seen.
Neither of them was bluffing; they both meant business.
'All right,' Ace said softly, speaking to Chris. 'But I know how you're
going to come out of this, motherfuck.'
'No you don't,' Chris said.
'You little prick!' Eyeball said loudly. 'You're gonna wind up in traction
for
this!'
'Bite my bag,' Chris told him.
With an inarticulate sound of rage Eyeball started forward and Chris put
a bullet into the water about ten feet in front of him. It kicked up a splash.
Eyeball jumped back, cursing.
'Okay, now what?' Ace asked.
'Now you guys get into your cars and bomb on back to Castle Rock.
After that I don't care. But you ain't getting him.' He touched Ray Brower
lightly, almost reverently, with the toe of one sopping sneaker. 'You dig
me?'
'But we'll get you,' Ace said. He was starting to smile again. 'Don't you
know
that?'
'We'll get you hard,' Ace said, smiling. 'We'll hurt you. I can't believe you
don't know that. We'll put you all in the fuckin' hospital with fuckin'
ruptures. Sincerely.'
'Oh, why don't you go home and fuck your mother some more? I hear she
loves the way you do it'
Ace's smile froze. 'I'll kill you for that. Nobody ranks my mother.'
'I heard your mother fucks for bucks,' Chris informed him, and as Ace
began to pale, as his complexion began to approach Chris's own ghastly
whiteness, he added: 'In fact, I heard she throws blowjobs for jukebox
nickels. I heard -'
Then the storm came back, viciously, all at once. Only this time it was
hail instead of rain. Instead of whispering or talking, the woods now
seemed alive with hokey B-movie jungle drums-it was the sound of big ice
hailstones bonking off treetrunks. Stinging pebbles began to hit my
shoulders-it felt as if some sentient, malevolent force was throwing them.
Worse than that, they began to strike Ray Brower's upturned face with an
awful splatting sound that reminded us of him again, of his terrible and
unending patience.
Vern caved in first, with a wailing scream. He fled up the embankment in
huge, gangling strides. Teddy held out a minute longer, then ran after Vern,
his hands held up over his head. On their side, Vince Desjardins floundered
back under some nearby trees and Fuzzy Brackowicz joined him. But the
others stood pat, and Ace began to grin again.
'Stick with me, Gordie," Chris said in a low, shaky voice. 'Stick with me,
man.'
'I'm right here.'
'Go on, now,' Chris said to Ace, and he was able, by some magic, to get
the shakiness out of his voice. He sounded as if he was instructing a stupid
infant.
'Well get you,' Ace said. 'We're not going to forget it, if that's what you're
thinking. This is big time, baby.'
"That's fine. You just go on and do your getting another day.'
'Well fuckin' ambush you, Chambers. We'll -'
'Get out!' Chris screamed, and levelled the gun. Ace stepped back.
He looked at Chris a moment longer, nodded, then turned around. 'Come
on,' he said to the others. He looked back over his shoulder at Chris and me
once more. 'Be seeing you.'
They went back into the screen of trees between the bog and the road.
Chris and I stood perfectly still in spite of the hail that was welting us,
reddening our skins,
and piling up all around us like summer snow. We stood and listened and
above the crazy calypso sound of the hail hitting the treetrunks we heard
two cars start up.
'Stay right here,' Chris told me, and he started across the bog.
'Chris!' I said, panicky.
'I got to. Stay here.'
It seemed he was gone a very long time. I became convinced that either
Ace or Eyeball had lurked behind and grabbed him. I stood my ground with
nobody but Ray Brower for company and waited for somebody-anybody -to
come back. After a while, Chris did.
'We did it,' he said. 'They're gone.'
'You sure?'
'Yeah. Both cars.' He held his hands up over his head, locked together
with the gun between them, and shook the double fist in a wry
championship gesture. Then he dropped them and smiled at me. I think it
was the saddest, scaredest smile I ever saw.' "Suck my fat one"-whoever
told you you had a fat one, Lachance?'
'Biggest one in four counties,' I said. I was shaking all over.
We looked at each other warmly for a second, and then, maybe
embarrassed by what we were seeing, looked down together. A nasty thrill
of fear shot through me, and the sudden splash splash as Chris shifted his
feet let me know that he had seen, too. Ray Brewer's eyes had gone wide
and white, starey and pupilless, like the eyes that look out at you from
Grecian statuary. It only took a second to understand what had happened,
but understanding didn't lessen the horror. His eyes had filled up with round
white hailstones.
Now they were melting and the water ran down his cheeks as if he were
weeping for his own grotesque position- a tatty prize to be fought over by
two bunches of stupid hick kids. His clothes were also white with hail. He
seemed to be lying in his own shroud.
'Oh, Gordie, hey,' Chris said shakily. 'Say-hey, man. What a creepshow
for
him.'
'I don't think he knows -'
'Maybe that was his ghost we heard. Maybe he knew this was gonna
happen. What a fuckin' creepshow, I'm sincere.'
Branches crackled behind us. I whirled, sure they had flanked us, but
Chris went back to contemplating the body after one short, almost casual
glance. It was Vern and Teddy, their jeans soaked black and plastered to
their legs, both of them grinning like dogs that have been sucking eggs.
'What are we gonna do, man?' Chris asked, and I felt a weird chill steal
through me.
Maybe he was talking to me, maybe he was but he was still looking
down at the body.
'We're gonna take him back, ain't we?' Teddy asked, puzzled. 'We're
gonna be heroes. Ain't that right?' He looked from Chris to me and back to
Chris again.
Chris looked up as if startled out of a dream. His lip curled. He took big
steps towards Teddy, planted both hands on Teddy's chest, and pushed him
roughly backwards. Teddy stumbled, pinwheeled his arms for balance, then
sat down with a soggy splash. He blinked up at Chris like a surprised
muskrat. Vern was looking warily at Chris, as if he feared madness. Perhaps
that wasn't far from the mark.
'You keep your trap shut,' Chris said to Teddy. 'Paratroops over the side
my ass. You lousy rubber chicken.'
'It was the hail!' Teddy cried out, angry and ashamed. 'It wasn't those
guys, Chris! I'm ascared of storms! I can't help it! I would have taken all of
'em on at once, I swear on my mother's name! But I'm ascared of storms!
Shit! I can't help it!' He began to cry again, sitting there in the water.
'What about you?' Chris asked, turning to Vern. 'Are you ascared of
storms
too?'
Vern shook his head vacuously, still astounded by Chris's rage. 'Hey,
man, I thought we was all runnin'.'
'You must be a mind-reader then, because you ran first'
Vem swallowed twice and said nothing.
Chris stared at him, his eyes sullen and wild. Then he turned to me.
'Going to build him a litter, Gordie.'
'If you say so, Chris.'
'Sure! Like in Scouts.' His voice had begun to climb into strange, reedy
levels. 'Just like in the fuckin' Scouts. A litter -poles and shuts. Like in the
handbook. Right, Gordie?'
'Yeah. If you want But what if those guys -'
'Fuck those guys!' he screamed. 'You're all a bunch of chickens! Fuck off,
creeps!'
'Chris, they could call the sheriff. To get back at us.'
"He's ours and we're gonna take him OUT!'
Those guys would say anything to get us in dutch,' I told him. My words
sounded thin, stupid, sick with the flu. 'Say anything and then lie each other
up. You know how people can get other people in trouble telling lies, man.
Like with the milk-mo-'
'I DONT CARE!" he screamed, and lunged at me with his fists up. But
one of his feet struck Ray Brower's ribcage with a soggy thump, making the
body rock. He tripped and fell full-length and I waited for him to get up and
maybe punch me in the mouth but instead he lay where he had fallen, head
pointing towards the embankment, arms stretched out over his head like a
diver about to execute, in the exact posture Ray Brower had been in when
we found him. I looked wildly at Chris's feet to make sure his sneakers were
still on. Then he began to cry and scream, his body bucking in the muddy-
water, splashing it around, fists drumming up and down in it head twisting
from side to side. Teddy and Vem were staring at him, agog, because
nobody had ever seen Chris Chambers cry. After a moment or two I walked
back to the embankment, climbed it, and sat down on one of the rails.
Teddy and Vern followed me. And we sat there in the rain, not talking,
looking like those three Monkeys of Virtue they sell in dimestores and those
sleazy gift-shops that always look like they are tottering on the edge of
bankruptcy.
28
It was twenty minutes before Chris climbed the embankment to sit down
beside us. The clouds had begun to break. Spears of sun came down
through the rips. The bushes seemed to have gone three shades darker green
in the last forty-five minutes.
He was mud ail the way up one side and down the other. His hair was
standing up in muddy spikes.
The only clean parts of him were the whitewashed circles around his
eyes.
'You're right, Gordie,' he said. 'Nobody gets last dibs. Goocher all around,
huh?'
I nodded. Five minutes passed. No one said anything. And I happened to
have a thought just in case they did call Bannerman. I went back down the
embankment and over to where Chris had been standing. I got down on my
knees and began to comb carefully through the water and marshgrass with
my fingers.
'What you doing?' Teddy asked, joining me.
'It's to your left, I think,' Chris said, and pointed.
I looked there and after a minute or two I found both shell casings. They
winked in the fresh sunlight. I gave them to Chris. He nodded and stuffed
them into a pocket of his jeans.
'Now we go,' Chris said.
'Hey, come on!' Teddy yelled, in real agony. 'I wanna take 'im!'
'Listen, dummy,' Chris said, 'if we take him back we could all wind up in
the reformatory. It's like Gordie says. Those guys could make up any story
they wanted to. What if they said we killed him, huh? How would you like
that?'
'I don't give a damn,' Teddy said sulkily. Then he looked at us with
absurd hope. 'Besides, we might only get a couple of months or so. As
excessories. I mean, we're only twelve fuckin' years old, they ain't gonna
put us in Shawshank.'
Chris said softly: 'You can't get in the army if you got a record, Teddy.'
I was pretty sure that was nothing but a bald-faced lie -but somehow this
didn't seem the time to say so. Teddy just looked at Chris for a long time,
his mouth trembling. Finally he managed to squeak out: 'No shit?'
'Ask Gordie.'
He looked at me hopefully.
'He's right,' I said, feeling like a great big turd. 'He's right, Teddy. First
thing they do when you volunteer is to check your name through R&I.'
'Holy God!'
'We're gonna shag ass back to the trestle,' Chris said. 'Then well get off
the tracks and come into Castle Rock from the other direction. If people ask
where we were, we'll say we went campin' up on Brickyard Hill and got
lost.'
'Milo Pressman knows better,' I said. 'That creep at the Florida Market
does,
too.'
'Well, we'll say Milo scared us and that's when we decided to go up on
the Brickyard.' I nodded. That might work. If Vern and Teddy could
remember to stick to it 'What about if our folks get together?' Vern asked.
'You worry about it if you want,' Chris said. 'My dad'll still be juiced up.'
'Come on, then,' Vern said, eyeing the screen of trees between us and the
Back Harlow Road. He looked like he expected Bannerman, along with a
brace of bloodhounds, to come crashing through at any moment 'Let's get
while the gettin's good.' We were all on our feet now, ready to go. The birds
were singing like crazy, pleased with the rain and the shine and the worms
and just about everything in the world, I guess. We all turned around, as if
pulled on strings, and looked back at Ray Brower. He was lying there, alone
again. His arms had flopped out when we turned him over and now he was
sort of spreadeagled, as if to welcome the sunshine. For a moment it seemed
all right a more natural deathscene than any ever constructed for a viewing-
room audience by a mortician. Then you saw the bruise, the caked blood on
the chin and under the nose, and the way the corpse was beginning to
bloat. You saw that the bluebottles had come out with the sun and that they
were circling the body, buzzing indolently. You remembered that gassy
smell, sickish but dry, like farts in a closed room. He was a boy our age, he
was dead, and I rejected the idea that anything about it could be natural; I
pushed it away with horror.
'Okay,' Chris said, and he meant to be brisk but his voice came out of his
throat like a handful of dry bristles from an old whiskbroom. 'Double time.'
We started to almost-trot back the way we had come. We didn't talk. I
don't know about the others, but I was too busy thinking to talk. There were
things that bothered me about the body of Ray Brower-they bothered me
then and they bother me now. A bad bruise on the side of his face, a scalp
laceration, a bloody nose. No more-at least, no more visible. People walk
away from bar-fights in worse condition and go right on drinking. Yet the
train must have hit him; why else would his sneakers be off his feet that
way? And how come the engineer hadn't seen him? Could it be that the
train had hit him hard enough to toss him but not to kill him? I thought that,
under just the right combination of circumstances, that could have
happened. Had the train hit him a hefty, teeth-rattling sideswipe as he tried
to get out of the way? Hit him and knocked him in a flying, backwards
somersault over that eaved-in banking? Had he perhaps lain awake and
trembling in the dark for hours, not just lost now but disorientated as well,
cut off from the world? Maybe he had died of fear. A bird with crushed
tailfeathers once died in my cupped hands in just that way. Its body
trembled and vibrated lightly, its beak opened and closed, its dark, bright
eyes stared up at me. Then the vibration quit, the beak froze half-open, and
the black eyes became lacklustre and uncaring. It could have been that way
with Ray Brower. He could have died because he was simply too frightened
to go on living.
But there was another thing, and that bothered me most of all, I think. He
had started off to go berrying. I seemed to remember the news reports
saying he'd been carrying a tin pail. When we got back I went to the library
and looked it up in the newspapers just to be sure, and I was right He'd been
berrying, and he'd had a pail. But we hadn't found it We found him, and we
found his sneakers. He must have thrown it away somewhere between
Chamberlain and the boggy patch of ground in Harlow where he died. He
perhaps clutched it even tighter at first, as though it linked him to home and
safety. But as his fear grew, and with it that sense of being utterly alone,
with no chance of rescue except for whatever he could do by himself, as the
real cold terror set it, he maybe threw it away into the woods on one side of
the tracks or the other, hardily even noticing it was gone. I've thought of
going back and looking for it-how does that strike you for morbid? I've
thought of driving to the end of the Back Harlow Road in my almost new
Ford van and getting out of it some bright summer morning, all by myself,
my wife and children far off in another world where, if you turn a switch,
lights come on in the dark. I've thought about how it would be. Pulling my
pack out of the back and resting it on the customized van's rear bumper
while I carefully remove my shirt and tie it around my waist. Rubbing my
chest and shoulders with Muskol insect repellent and then crashing through
the woods to where that boggy place was, the place where we found him.
Would the grass grow up yellow there, in the shape of his body? Of course
not, there would be no sign, but still you wonder, and you realize what a
thin film there is between your rational man costume-the writer with leather
elbow-patches on his corduroy jacket -and the capering, Gorgon myths of
childhood. Then climbing the embankment, now overgrown with weeds,
and walking slowly beside the rusted tracks and rotted ties towards
Chamberlain. Stupid fantasy. An expedition looking for a fourteen-year-old
blueberry
pail, which was probably cast deep into the woods or ploughed under by
a bulldozer readying a half-acre plot for a tract house or so deeply
overgrown by weeds and brambles it had become invisible. But I feel sure it
is still there, somewhere along the old discontinued GS&WM line, and at
times the urge to go and look is almost a frenzy. It usually comes early in
the morning, when my wife is showering and the kids are watching Batman
and Scooby-Doo on channel 38 out of Boston, and I am feeling the most
like the pre-adolescent Gordon Lachance that once strode the earth, walking
and talking and occasionally crawling on his belly like a reptile. That boy
was me, I think. And the thought which follows, chilling me like a dash of
cold water, is: Which boy do you mean?
Sipping a cup of tea, looking at sun slanting through the kitchen
windows, hearing the TV from one end of the house and the shower from
the other, feeling the pulse behind my eyes that means I got through one
beer too many the night before, I feel sure I could find it. I would see clear
metal winking through rust, the bright summer sun reflecting it back to my
eyes. I would go down the side of the embankment, push aside the grasses
that had grown up and twined toughly around its handle, and then I would
what? Why, simply pull it out of time. I would turn it over and over in my
hands, wondering at the feel of it, marvelling at the knowledge that the last
person to touch it had been long years in his grave. Suppose there was a
note in it? Help me, I'm lost. Of course there wouldn't be -boys don't go out
to pick blueberries with paper and pencil-but just suppose. I imagine the
awe I'd feel would be as dark as an eclipse. Still, it's mostly just the idea of
holding that pail in my two hands, I guess-as much a symbol of my living
as his dying, proof that I really do know which boy it was-which boy of the
five of us. Holding it. Reading every year in its cake of rust and the fading
of its bright shine. Feeling it, trying to understand the suns that shone on it
the rains that fell on it, and the snows that covered it And to wonder where I
was when each thing happened to it in its lonely place, where I was, what I
was doing, who I was loving, how I was getting along, where I was. I'd hold
it, read it, feel it and look at my own face in whatever reflection might be
left. Can you dig it?
29
We got back to Castle Rock a little past five o'clock on Sunday morning,
the day before Labour Day. We had walked all night Nobody complained,
although we all had blisters and were all ravenously hungry. My head was
throbbing with a killer headache, and my legs felt twisted and burning with
fatigue. Twice we had to scramble down the embankment to get out of the
way of freights. One of them was going our way, but moving far too fast to
hop. It was seeping daylight when we got to the trestle spanning the Castle
again. Chris looked at it, looked at the river, looked back at us.
'Fuck it I'm walkin' across. If I get hit by a train I won't have to watch out
for fuckin' Ace Merrill'
We all walked across it-plodded might be the better verb. No train came.
When we got to the dump we climbed the fence (no Milo and no Chopper,
not this early, and not on a Sunday morning) and went directly to the pump.
Vern primed it and we all took turns sticking our heads under the icy flow,
slapping the water over
our bodies, drinking until we could hold no more. Then we had to put our
shirts on again because the morning seemed chilly. We walked-limped -
back into town and stood for a moment on the sidewalk in front of the
vacant lot We looked at our treehouse so we wouldn't have to look at each
other.
'Well,' Teddy said at last, 'seeya in school on Wednesday. I think I'm
gonna sleep until then.'
'Me too,' Vern said. I'm too pooped to pop.'
Chris whistled tunelessly through his teeth and said nothing.
'Hey, man,' Teddy said awkwardly. 'No hard feelin's, okay?'
'No,' Chris said, and suddenly his sombre, tired face broke into a sweet
and sunny grin.
'We did it, didn't we? We did the bastard.'
'Yeah,' Vern said. 'Your fuckin' A. Now Billy's gonna do me: 'So what?'
Chris said. 'Richie's gonna tool up on me and Ace is probably gonna tool up
on Gordie and somebody else'll tool up on Teddy. But we did it'
'That's right,' Vern said. But he still sounded unhappy.
Chris looked at me. 'We did it, didn't we?' he asked softly. It was worth it,
wasn't it?'
'Sure it was,' I said.
'Fuck this,' Teddy said in his dry I'm-losing-interest way. 'You guys sound
like fuckin' Meet the Press. Gimme some skin, man. I'm gonna toot home
and see if Mom's got me on the Ten Most Wanted list.'
We all laughed, Teddy gave us his surprised Oh-Lord-what-now look,
and we gave him skin. Then he and Vern started off in their direction and I
should have gone in mine but I hesitated for a second.
'Walk with you,' Chris offered.
'Sure, okay.'
We walked a block or so without talking. Castle Rock was awesomely
quiet in the day's first light, and I felt an almost holy tiredness-is-slipping-
away sort of feeling. We were awake and the whole world was asleep and I
almost expected to turn the corner and see my deer standing at the far end
of Carbine Street, where the GS&WM tracks pass through the mill's loading
yard.
Finally Chris spoke. 'They'll tell,' he said.
'You bet they will. But not today or tomorrow, if that's what you're
worried about. It'll be a long time before they tell, I think. Years, maybe.'
He looked at me, surprised.
'They're scared, Chris. Teddy especially, that they won't take him in the
army. But Vern's scared, too. They'll lose some sleep over it, and there's
gonna be times this fall when it's right on the tips of their tongues to tell
somebody, but I don't think they will. And then you know what? It sounds
fucking crazy, but I think they'll almost forget it ever happened.'
He was nodding slowly. 'I didn't think of it just like that. You see through
people, Gordie.'
'Man, I wish I did.'
'You do, though.'
We walked another block in silence.
'I'm never gonna get out of this town,' Chris said, and sighed. 'When you
come back from college on summer vacation, you'll be able to look me and
Vern and Teddy up down at Sukey's after the seven-to-three shift's over. If
you want to. Except you'll probably never want to.' He laughed a creepy
laugh.
'Quit jerking yourself off,' I said, trying to sound tougher than I felt- I
was thinking about being out there in the woods, about Chris saying: And
maybe I took it to old lady Simons and told her, and maybe I got a three-
day vacation anyway, because the money never showed up and maybe the
next week old lady Simons had this brand-new skirt on when she came to
school The look. The look in his eyes.
'No jerk-off, daddy-O,' Chris said.
I rubbed my first finger against my thumb. 'This is the world's smallest
violin playing "My Heart Pumps Purple Piss for You".'
'He was ours,' Chris said, his eyes dark in the morning light.
We had reached the corner of my street and we stopped there. It was
quarter past six.
Back towards town we could see the Sunday Telegram truck pulling up in
front of Teddy's uncle's stationery shop. A man in bluejeans and a tee-shirt
threw off a bundle of papers. They bounced upside down on the sidewalk,
showing the colour funnies (always Dick Tracey and Blondie on the first
page). Then the truck drove on, its driver intent on delivering the outside
world to the rest of the whistlestops up the line-Otisfield, Norway-South
Paris, Waterford, Stoneham. I wanted to say something more to Chris and
didn't know how to.
'Gimme some skin, man,' he said, sounding tired.
'Chris-'
'Skin.'
I gave him some skin. 'I'll see you.'
He grinned-that same sweet, sunny grin. 'Not if I see you first, fuckface.'
He walked off, still laughing, moving easily and gracefully, as though he
didn't hurt like me and have blisters like me and like he wasn't lumped and
bumped with mosquito and chigger and blackfly bites like me. As if he
didn't have a care in the world, as if he was going to some real boss place
instead of just home to a three-room house (shack would have been closer
to the truth) with no indoor plumbing and broken windows covered with
plastic and a brother who was probably laying for him in the front yard.
Even if I'd known the right thing to say, I probably couldn't have said it.
Speech destroys the functions of love, I think-that's a hell of a thing for a
writer to say, I guess, but I believe it to be true. If you speak to tell a deer
you mean it no harm, it glides away with a single flip of its tail. The word is
the harm. Love isn't what these asshole poets like McKuen want you to
think it is. Love has teeth; they bite; the wounds never close. No word, no
combination of words, can close those lovebites. It's the other way around,
that's the joke. If those wounds dry up, the words die with them. Take it
from me. I've made my life from the words, and I know that is so.
30
The back door was locked so I fished the spare key out from under the
mat and let myself in. The kitchen was empty, silent, suicidally clean. I
could hear the hum the fluorescent bars over the sink made when I turned
on the switch. It had been literally years since I had been up before my
mother; I couldn't even remember the last time such a thing had happened.
I took off my shirt and put it in the plastic clothes basket behind the
washing machine. I got a clean rag from under the sink and sponged off
with it-face, neck, pits, belly. Then unzipped my pants and scrubbed my
crotch-my testicles in particular-until my skin began to hurt. It seemed I
couldn't get clean enough down there, although the red weal left by the
bloodsucker was rapidly fading. I still have a tiny crescent-shaped scar
there.
My wife once asked about it and I told her a lie before I was even aware I
meant to do so.
When I was done with the rag, I threw it away. It was filthy.
I got out a dozen eggs and scrambled six of them together. When they
were semi-solid in the pan, I added a side dish of crushed pineapple and
half a quart of milk. I was just sitting down to eat when my mother came in,
her grey hair tied in a knot behind her head.
She was wearing a faded pink bathrobe and smoking a Camel.
'Gordon, where have you been?'
'Camping,' I said, and began to eat 'We started off in Vern's field and then
went up the Brickyard Hill. Vern's mom said she would call you. Didn't
she?'
'She probably talked to your father,' she said, and glided past me to the
sink. She looked like a pink ghost. The fluorescent bars were less than kind
to her face; they made her complexion look almost yellow. She sighed
almost sobbed. 'I miss Dennis most in the mornings,' she said. 'I always
look in his room and it's always empty, Gordon. Always.'
'Yeah, that's a bitch,' I said.
'He always slept with his window open and the blankets Gordon? Did
you say something?'
'Nothing important, Mom.'
' and the blankets pulled up to his chin,' she finished Then she just
stared out the window, her back to me. I went on eating. I was trembling all
over.
31
The story never did get out
Oh, I don't mean that Ray Brower's body was never found; it was. But
neither our gang nor their gang got the credit In the end, Ace must have
decided that an anonymous phonecall was the safest course, because that's
how the location of the corpse was reported. What I mean was that none of
our parents ever found out what we'd been up to that Labour Day weekend.
Chris's dad was still drinking, just as Chris had said he would be. His
mom had gone off to Lewiston to stay with her sister, the way she almost
always did when Mr Chambers was on a bender. She went and left Eyeball
in charge of the younger kids. Eyeball had fulfilled his responsibility by
going off with Ace and his buddies, leaving nine-year-old Sheldon, five-
year-old Emery, and two-year-old Deborah to sink or swim on their own.
Teddy's mom got worried the second night and called
Vern's mom. Vern's mom, who was also never going to do the gameshow
circuit, said we were still out in Vern's tent. She knew because she could
look right out the kitchen window and see a light on in there. Teddy's mom
said she sure hoped no one was smoking cigarettes in there and Vern's mom
said it looked like a flashlight to her, and besides, she was sure that none of
Vern's or Billy's friends smoked.
My dad asked me some vague questions, looked mildly troubled at my
evasive answers, said we'd go fishing together sometime, and that was the
end of it. If the parents had gotten together in the week or two afterwards,
everything would have fallen down but they never did.
Milo Pressman never spoke up, either. My guess is that he thought twice
about it being our word against his, and how we would all swear that he
sicced Chopper on me. So the story never came out-but that wasn't the end
of it.
32
One day near the end of the month, while I was walking some from
school, a black 1952 Ford cut into the curb in front of me. There was no
mistaking that car. Gangster whitewalls and spinner hubcaps, highrise
chrome bumpers. and lucite deathknob with a rose embedded in it clamped
to the steering wheel. Painted on the back deck was a deuce and a one-eyed
jack. Beneath them, in Roman Gothic script, were the words WILD CARD.
The doors flew open; Ace Merrill and Fuzzy Brackowicz stepped out
'Cheap hood, right?' Ace said, smiling his gentle smile 'My mother loves the
way I do it to her, right?'
'We're gonna rack you, baby,' Fuzzy said.
I dropped my schoolbooks on the sidewalk and ran. I was busting my
buns but they caught me before I even made the end of the block. Ace hit
me with a flying tackle and I went full-length on the paving. My chin hit the
cement and I didn't see stars; I saw whole constellations, whole nebulae. I
was already crying when they picked me up, not so much from my elbows
and knees, both pairs scraped and bleeding, or even from fear-it was vast,
impotent rage that made me cry. Chris was right. He had been ours. I
twisted and turned and almost squiggled free. Then Fuzzy hoicked his knee
into my crotch. The pain was amazing, incredible, nonpareil; it widened the
horizons of pain from plain old wide screen to Vista Vision. I began to
scream. Screaming seemed to be my best chance.
Ace punched me twice in the face, long and looping haymaker blows.
The first one closed my left eye; it would be four days before I was really
able to see out of that eye again The second broke my nose with a crunch
that sounded the way crispy cereal sounds inside your head when you chew.
Then old Mrs Chalmers came out on her porch with her cane clutched in
one arthritis-twisted hand and a Herbert Tareyton jutting from one corner of
her mouth. She began to bellow at them: 'Hi! Hi there, you boys! You stop
that! Let 'im alone! Let 'im up! Bullies! Bullies! Two on one! Police!
Poleeeece!'
'Don't let me see you around, dipshit,' Ace said, smiling, and they let go
of me and backed off. I sat up and then leaned over, cupping my wounded
balls, sickly sure I was going to throw up and then die. I was still crying,
too. But when Fuzzy started
to walk around me, the sight of his pegged jeans-leg snugged down over
the top of his motorcycle boot brought all the fury back. I grabbed him and
bit his calf through his jeans. I bit him just as hard as I could. Fuzzy began
to do a little screaming of his own. He also began hopping around on one
leg, and, incredibly, he was calling me a dirty fighter. I was watching him
hop around and that was when Ace stamped down on my left hand,
breaking the first two fingers. I heard them break. They didn't sound like
crispy cereal. They sounded like pretzels. Then Ace and Fuzzy were going
back to Ace's '52, Ace sauntering with his hands in his back pockets, Fuzzy
hopping on one leg and throwing curses back over his shoulder at me. I
curled up on the sidewalk, crying. Aunt Evvie Chalmers came down her
walk, thudding her cane angrily as she came. She asked me if I needed the
doctor. I sat up and managed to stop most of the crying. I told her I didn't.
'Bullshit,' she bellowed-Aunt Evvie was deaf and bellowed everything. 'I
saw where that bully got you. Boy, your sweetmeats are going to swell up
to the size of Mason jars.' She took me into her house, gave me a wet rag
for my nose-it had begun to resemble a summer squash by then-and gave
me a big cup of medicinal-tasting coffee that was somehow calming. She
kept bellowing at me that she should call the doctor and I kept telling her
not to. Finally she gave up and I walked home. Very slowly, I walked home.
My balls weren't the size of Mason jars yet, but they were on their way. My
mom and dad got a look at me and wigged right out -I was sort of surprised
that they noticed anything at all, to tell the truth. Who were the boys? Could
I pick them out of a line-up? That from my father, who never missed Naked
City and The Untouchables. I said I didn't think I could pick the boys out of
a line-up. I said I was tired. Actually I think I was in shock-in shock and
more than a little drunk from Aunt Evvie's coffee, which must have been at
least sixty per cent VSOP brandy. I said I thought they were from some
other town, or from 'up the city'- a phrase everyone understood to mean
Lewiston-Auburn.
They took me to Dr Clarkson in the station wagon-Dr Clarkson, who is
still alive today, was even then old enough to have quite possibly been on
armchair-to-armchair terms with God. He set my nose and my fingers and
gave my mother a prescription for painkiller. Then he got them out of the
examining room on some pretext or other and came over to me, shuffling,
head forward, like Boris Karloff approaching Igor.
'Who did it, Gordon?'
'I don't know, Dr Cla-'
'You're lying.'
'No, sir. Huh-uh.'
His sallow cheeks began to glow with colour. 'Why should you protect
the cretins who did this? Do you think they will respect you? They will
laugh and call you stupid-fool!
"Oh," they'll say, "there goes the stupid fool we beat up for kicks the
other day. Ha-ha! Hoo-hoo! Har-de-har-har-har!"'
'I didn't know them. Really.'
I could see his hands itching to shake me, but of course he couldn't do
that. So he sent me out to my parents, shaking his white head and muttering
about juvenile delinquents. He would no doubt tell his old friend God all
about it that night over their cigars and sherry.
I didn't care if Ace and Fuzzy and the rest of those assholes respected me
or thought I was stupid or never thought about me at all. But there was
Chris to think of. His brother Eyeball had broken his arm in two places and
had left his face looking like a Canadian sunrise. They had to set the elbow-
break with a steel pin. Mrs
McGinn from down the road saw Chris staggering along the soft
shoulder, bleeding from both ears and reading a Richie Rich comic book.
She took him to the CMG Emergency Room where Chris told the doctor he
had fallen down the cellar stairs in the dark.
'Right,' the doctor said, every bit as disgusted with Chris as Dr Clarkson
had been with me, and then he went to call Sheriff Bannerman.
While he did that from his office, Chris went slowly down the hall,
holding the temporary sling against his chest so the arm wouldn't swing and
grate the broken bones together, and used a nickel in the pay phone to call
home-he told me later it was the first collect call he had ever made and he
was scared to death that Mrs McGinn wouldn't accept the charges-but she
did.
'Chris, are you all right?' she asked.
'Yes, thank you,' Chris said.
'I'm sorry I couldn't stay with you, Chris, but I had pies in the-'
'That's all right, Missus McGinn,' Chris said. 'Can you see the Buick in
our dooryard?'
The Buick was the car Chris's mother drove. It was ten years old and
when the engine got hot it smelted like frying Hush Puppies.
'It's there,' she said cautiously. Best not to mix in too much with the
Chamberses. Poor white trash; shanty Irish.
'Would you go over and tell Mamma to go downstairs and take the
lightbulb out of the socket in the cellar?'
'Chris, I really, my pies -'
'Tell her,' Chris said implacably, 'to do it right away. Unless she maybe
wants my brother to go to jail.'
Vern and Teddy took their lumps, too, although not as bad as either Chris
or I. Billy was laying for Vern when Vern got home. He took after him with
a stovelength and hit him hard enough to knock him unconscious after only
four or five good licks. Vern was no more than stunned, but Billy got scared
he might have killed him and stopped. Three of them caught Teddy walking
home from the vacant lot one afternoon. They punched him out and broke
his glasses. He fought them, but they wouldn't fight him when they realized
he was groping after them like a blindman in the dark.
We hung out together at school looking like the remains of a Korean
assault force. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but everybody
understood that we'd had a pretty serious run-in with the big kids and
comported ourselves like men. A few stories went around. All of them were
wildly wrong.
When the casts came off and the bruises healed, Vern and Teddy just
drifted away. They had discovered a whole new group of contemporaries
that they could lord it over. Most of them were real wets-scabby, scrubby
little fifth-grade assholes-but Vern and Teddy kept bringing them to the
treehouse, ordering them around, strutting like Nazi generals. Chris and I
began to drop by there less and less frequently, and after a while the place
was theirs by default I remember going up one time in the spring of 1961
and noticing that the place smelled like a shootoff in a haymow. I never
went there again that I can recall. Teddy and Vern slowly became just two
more faces in the halls or in 3:30 detention. We nodded and said hi. That
was all. It happens. Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a
restaurant, did you ever notice that? But when I think of that dream, the
corpses under the water pulling implacably at my legs, it seems right that it
should be that way. Some people drown, that's all. It's not fair, but it
happens. Some people drown.
Vern Tessio was killed in a housefire that swept a Lewiston apartment
building in 1966 -in Brooklyn and the Bronx, they call that sort of
apartment building a slum tenement, I believe. The Fire Department said it
started around two in the morning, and the entire building was nothing but
cinders in the cellar-hole by dawn. There had been a large drunken party;
Vern was there. Someone fell asleep in one of the bedrooms with a live
cigarette going. Vern himself, maybe, drifting off, dreaming of his pennies.
They identified him and the four others who died by their teeth.
Teddy went in a squalid car crash. There used to be a saying when I was
growing up: 'If you go out alone you're a hero. Take somebody else with
you and you're dogpiss. ' Teddy, who had wanted nothing but the service
since the time he was old enough to want anything, was turned down by the
Air Force and classified 4-F by the draft. Anyone who had seen his glasses
and his hearing aid knew it was going to happen-anyone but Teddy. In his
junior year at high school he got a three-day vacation from school for
calling the guidance counsellor a lying sack of shit. The g. o. had observed
Teddy coming in every so often-like every day-and checking over his
career-board for new service literature. He told Teddy that maybe he should
think about another career, and that was when Teddy blew his stack.
He was held back a year for repeated absences, tardies, and the attendant
flunked courses but he did graduate. He had an ancient Chevrolet Bel
Aire, and he used to hang around the places where Ace and Fuzzy and the
rest had hung around before him: the pool hall, the dance hall, Sukey's
Tavern, which is closed now, and the Mellow Tiger, which isn't. He
eventually got a job with the Castle Rock Public Works Department, filling
up holes with hotpatch. The crash happened over in Harlow. Teddy's Bel
Aire was full of his friends (two of them had been part of that group he and
Vern took to bossing around way back in 1960), and they were all passing
around a couple of joints and a couple of bottles of Popov. They hit a utility
pole and sheared it off and the Chevrolet rolled six times. One girl came out
technically still alive. She lay for six months in what the nurses and
orderlies at Central Maine General call the C&T Ward-Cabbages and
Turnips. Then some merciful phantom pulled the plug on her respirator.
Teddy Duchamp was posthumously awarded the Dogpiss of the Year
Award.
Chris enrolled in the college courses in his second year of junior high-he
and I both knew that if he waited any longer it would be too late; he would
never catch up. Everyone jawed at him about it: his parents, who thought he
was putting on airs, his friends, most of whom dismissed him as a pussy, the
guidance counsellor, who didn't believe he could do the work, and most of
all the teachers, who didn't approve of this duck-tailed, leather-jacketed,
engineer-booted apparition who had materialized without warning in their
classrooms. You could see that the sight of those boots and that many-
zippered jacket offended them in connection with such high-minded
subjects as algebra, Latin, and earth science; such attire was meant for the
shop courses only. Chris sat among the well-dressed, vivacious boys and
girls from the middle-class families in Castle View and Brickyard Hill like
some silent, brooding Grendel that might turn on them at any moment,
produce a horrible roaring like the sound of dual glasspack mufflers, and
gobble them up, penny loafers, Peter Pan
collars, button-down paisley shirts and all. He almost quit a dozen times
that year. His father in particular hounded him, accusing Chris of thinking
he was better than his old man, accusing Chris of wanting 'to go up there to
the college so you can turn me into a bankrupt.' He once broke a Rhinegold
bottle over the back of Chris's head and Chris wound up in the CMC
Emergency Room again, where it took four stitches to close his scalp. His
old friends, most of whom were now majoring in Smoking Area, catcalled
him on the streets. The guidance counsellor huckstered him to take at least
some shop courses so he wouldn't flunk the whole slate. Worst of all, of
course, was just this: he'd been fucking off for the entire first seven years of
his public education, and now the bill had come due with a vengeance. We
studied together almost every night, sometimes for as long as six hours at a
stretch. I always came away from those sessions exhausted, and sometimes
I came away frightened as well-frightened by his incredulous rage at just
how murderously high that bill was. Before he could even begin to
understand Introductory Algebra, he had to relearn the fractions that he and
Teddy and Vern had played pocket pool through in the fifth grade. Before
he could even begin to understand Pater noster qui est in caelis, he had to be
told what nouns and prepositions and objects were. On the inside of his
English grammar, neatly lettered, were the words FUCK GERUNDS. His
compositional ideas were good and not badly organized, but his grammar
was bad and he approached the whole business of punctuation as if with a
shotgun. He wore out his copy of Warriner's and bought another in a
Portland bookstore-it was the first hardcover book he actually owned, and it
became a queer sort of Bible to him.
But by our junior year in high school, he had been accepted. Neither of
us made top honours, but I came out seventh and Chris stood nineteenth.
We were both accepted at the University of Maine, but I went to the Orono
campus while Chris enrolled at the Portland campus. Pre-law, can you
believe that? More Latin. We both dated through high school, but no girl
ever came between us. Does that sound like we went faggot? It would have
to most of our old friends, Vern and Teddy included. But it was only
survival. We were clinging to each other in deep water. I've explained about
Chris, I think; my reasons for clinging to him were less definable. His
desire to get away from Castle Rock and out of the mill's shadow seemed to
me to be my best part, and I could not just leave him to sink or swim on his
own. If he had drowned, that part of me would have drowned with him, I
think.
Near the end of the spring semester in 1968, the year when we all grew
our hair long and cut classes to go to teach-ins about the war in Viet Nam,
Chris went into a Chicken Delight to get a three-piece Snack Bucket Just
ahead of him, two men started arguing about which one had been first in
line. One of them pulled a knife. Chris, who had always been the best of us
at making peace, stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat The
man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions; he had been
released from Shawshank Penitentiary only the week before. Chris died
almost instantly. I was out of school when I read about it in the paper -Chris
had been finishing his second year of graduate studies. Me, I had been
married a year and a half and was teaching high school English. My wife
was pregnant and I was trying to write a book. When I read the news item-
STUDENT FATALLY STABBED IN PORTLAND RESTAURANT -I told
my wife I was going out for a milkshake. I drove out of town, parked, and
cried for him. Cried for damn near half an hour, I guess. I couldn't have
done that in front of my wife, much as I love her. It would have been pussy.
'I'm a writer now, like I said. A lot of the critics think what I write is shit.
A lot of the time I think they are right but it still freaks me out to put those
words, 'Freelance Writer', down in the Occupation blank of the forms you
have to fill out at credit desks and in doctors' offices. My story sounds so
much like a fairytale that it's fucking absurd. I sold the book and it was
made into a movie and the movie got good reviews and it was a smash hit
besides. This all had happened by the time I was twenty-six. The second
book was made into a movie as well, as was the third. I told you-it's fucking
absurd. Meantime, my wife doesn't seem to mind having me around the
house and we have three kids now. They all seem perfect to me, and most of
the time I'm happy. But the writing isn't so easy or as much fun as it used to
be. The phone rings a lot. Sometimes I get headaches, bad ones, and then I
have to go into a dim room and lie down until they go away. The doctor
says they aren't true migraines; he called them 'stressaches' and told me to
slow down. I worry about myself sometimes. What a stupid habit that is
and yet I can't quite seem to stop it. And I wonder if there is really any point
in what I'm doing, or what I'm supposed to make of a world where a man
can get sick playing 'let's pretend!.
But it's funny how I saw Ace Merrill again. My friends are dead but Ace
is alive. I saw him pulling out of the mill parking lot just after the three
o'clock whistle the last time I took my kids down home to see my dad.
The '52 Ford had become a '77 Ford station wagon. A faded bumper-
sticker said REAGAN/BUSH 1980. His hair was mowed into a crewcut and
he'd gotten fat. The sharp. handsome features I remembered were now
buried in an avalanche of flesh. I had left the kids with dad long enough to
go downtown and get the paper. I was standing on the corner of Main and
Carbine and he glanced at me as I waited to cross. There was no sign of
recognition on the face of this thirty-two-year-old man who had broken my
nose in another dimension of time.
I watched him wheel the Ford wagon into the dirt parking lot beside the
Mellow Tiger, get out, hitch at his pants, and walk inside. I could imagine
the brief wedge of country-western as he opened the door, the brief sour
whiff of Knick and Gansett on draught, the welcoming shouts of the other
regulars as he closed the door and placed his large ass on the same stool
which had probably held him up for at least three hours every day of his
life-except Sundays-since he was twenty-one. I thought: So that's what Ace
is now.
I looked to the left, and beyond the mill I could see the Castle River, not
so wide now but a little cleaner, still flowing under the bridge between
Castle Rock and Harlow. The trestle upstream is gone now, but the river is
still around. So am I.
The End
THE BREATHING METHOD
1: The Club
I dressed a bit more speedily than normal on that snowy, windy, bitter
night-I admit it. It was 23 December, 1970, and I suspect that there were
other members of the club who did the same. Taxis are notoriously hard to
come by in New York on stormy nights, so I called for a radio-cab. I did
this at five-thirty for an eight o'clock pick-up-my wife raised an eyebrow
but said nothing. I was under the awning of the apartment building on East
58th Street, where Ellen and I had lived since 1946, by quarter to eight, and
when the taxi was five minutes late, I found myself pacing up and down
impatiently.
The taxi arrived at 8.10 and I got in, too glad to be out of the wind to be
as angry with the driver as he probably deserved. That wind, part of a cold
front that had swept down from Canada the day before, meant business. It
whistled and whined around the cab's window, occasionally drowning out
the salsa on the driver's radio and rocking the big Checker on its springs.
Many of the stores were open but the sidewalks were nearly bare of last-
minute shoppers. Those that were abroad looked uncomfortable or actually
pained.
It had been flurrying off and on all day, and now the snow began again,
coming first in thin membranes, then twisting into cyclone shapes ahead of
us in the street. Coming home that night, I would think of the combination
of snow, a taxi, and New York City with considerably greater unease but I
did not of course know that then.
At the corner of 3rd and Fortieth, a large tinsel Christmas bell went
floating through the intersection like a spirit. 'Bad night,' the cabbie said.
"They'll have an extra two dozen in the morgue tomorrow. Wino Popsicles.
Plus a few bag-lady Popsicles.'
'I suppose.'
The cabbie ruminated. 'Well, good riddance,' he said finally. 'Less
welfare,
right?'
'Your Christmas spirit,' I said, 'is stunning in its width and depth.'
The cabbie ruminated. 'You one of those bleeding-hear liberals?' he asked
finally.
'I refuse to answer on the grounds that my answer might tend to
incriminate me,' I said.
The cabbie gave a why-do-I-always-get-the-wisenheimers snort but he
shut up.
He let me out at 2nd and Thirty-Fifth, and I walked halfway down the
block to the club, bent over against the whistling wind, holding my hat on
my head with one gloved hand.
In almost no time at all the life-force seemed to have been driven deep
into my body, a flickering blue flame about the size of the pilot-light in a
gas oven. At seventy-three, a man feels the cold quicker and deeper. That
man should be home in front of a fireplace or at least in front of an electric
heater. At seventy-three, hot blood isn't even really a memory; it's more of
an academic concept.
The latest flurry was letting up, but snow as dry as sand still beat into my
face. I was glad to see that the steps leading up to the door of 249 had been
sanded-that was Stevens's work, of course-Stevens knew the base alchemy
of old age well enough: not lead into gold but bones into glass. When I
think about such things, I believe that God probably thinks a great deal like
Groucho Marx.
Then Stevens was there, holding the door open, and a moment later I was
inside. Down the mahogany-panelled hallway, through double doors
standing three-quarters of the way open on their recessed tracks, into the
library cum reading-room cum bar. It was a dark room in which occasional
pools of light gleamed-reading-lamps. A richer, more textured light glowed
across the oak parquet floor, and I could hear the steady snap of birch logs
in the huge fireplace. The heat radiated all the way across the room -surely
there is no welcome for a man or a woman that can equal a fire on the
hearth. A paper rustled-dry, slightly impatient. That would be Johanssen,
with his Wall Street Journal. After ten years, it was possible to recognize his
presence simply by the way he read his stocks. Amusing and in a quiet
way, amazing.
Stevens helped me off with my overcoat, murmuring that it was a dirty
night; WCBS was now forecasting heavy snow before morning.
I agreed that it was indeed a dirty night and looked back into that big,
high-ceilinged room again. A dirty night, a roaring fire and a ghost story.
Did I say that at seventy-three hot blood is a thing of the past? Perhaps so.
But I felt something warm in my chest at the thought something that
hadn't been caused by the fire of Stevens's reliable, dignified welcome.
I think it was because it was McCarron's turn to tell the tale.
I had been coming to the brownstone which stands at 249 East 35th
Street for ten years -coming at intervals that were almost-but not quite-
regular. In my own mind I think of it is a 'gentleman's club', that amusing
pre-Gloria Steinem antiquity. But even now I am not sure that's what it
really is, or how it came to be in the first place. On the night Emlyn
McCarron told his story-the story of the Breathing Method-there were
perhaps thirteen clubmembers in all, although only six of us had come out
on that howling, bitter night. I can remember years when there might have
been as few as eight full-time members, and others when there were at least
twenty, and perhaps more. I suppose Stevens might know how it all came to
be-one thing I am sure of is that Stevens has been there from the first, no
matter how long that may be and I believe Stevens to be older than he
looks. Much, much older. He has a faint Brooklyn accent, but in spite of
that he is as brutally correct and as cuttingly punctilious as a third-
generation English butler. His reserve is part of his often maddening charm,
and Stevens's small smile is a locked and latched door. I have never seen
any club records-if he keeps them. I have never gotten a receipt of dues-
there are no dues. I have never been called by the club secretary-there is no
secretary, and at 249 East 35 th, there are no phones. There is no box of
white marbles and black balls. And the club-if it is a club-has never had a
name.
I first came to the club (as I must continue to call it) as the guest of
George Waterhouse. Waterhouse headed the law firm for which I had
worked since 1951. My progress upward in the firm-one of New York's
three biggest-had been steady but extremely slow; I was a slogger, a mule
for work, something of a centrepuncher but I had no real flair or genius. I
had seen men who had begun at the same time I had, promoted in giant
steps while I only continued to pace -and I saw it with no real surprise.
Waterhouse and I had exchanged pleasantries, attended the obligatory
dinner put on by the firm each October, and had little more congress until
the fall of 1960, when he dropped by my office one day in early November.
This in itself was unusual enough, and it had me thinking black thoughts
(dismissal) that were counterbalanced by giddy ones (an unexpected
promotion). It
was a puzzling visit. Waterhouse leaned in the doorway, his Phi Beta
Kappa key gleaming mellowly on his vest, and talked in amiable
generalities-none of what he said seemed to have any real substance or
importance. I kept expecting him to finish the pleasantries and get down to
cases: 'Now about this Casey brief,' or 'We've been asked to research the
Mayor's appointment of Salkowitz to -' But it seemed there were no cases.
He glanced at his watch, said he had enjoyed our talk and that he had to be
going. I was still blinking, bewildered, when he turned back and said
casually: There's a place where I go most Thursday nights-a sort of club.
Old duffers, mostly, but some of them are good company. They keep a
really excellent cellar, if you've a palate. Every now and then someone tells
a good story, as well. Why not come down some night, David? As my
guest.'
I stammered some reply-even now I'm not sure what it was. I was
bewildered by the offer. It had a spur-of-the-moment sound, but there was
nothing spur-of-tbe-moment about his eyes, blue Anglo-Saxon ice under the
bushy white whorls of his eyebrows. And if I don't remember exactly how I
replied, it was because I felt suddenly sure that this offer -vague and
puzzling as it was-had been exactly the specific I had kept expecting him to
get down to.
Ellen's reaction that evening was one of amused exasperation. I had been
with Waterhouse, Garden, Lawton, Frasier, and Effingham for something
like twenty years, and it was clear enough that I could not expect to rise
much above the mid-level position I now held; it was her idea that this was
the firm's cost-efficient substitute for a gold watch.
'Old men telling war stories and playing poker,' she said. 'A night of that
and you're supposed to be happy in the Research Library until they pension
you off, I suppose oh, I put two Becks' on ice for you.' And she kissed me
warmly. I suppose she had seen something on my face-God knows she's
good at reading me after all the years we've spent together.
Nothing happened over a course of weeks. When my mind turned to
Waterhouse's odd offer-certainly odd coming from a man with whom I met
less than a dozen times a year, and who I only saw socially at perhaps three
parties a year, including the company party in October- I supposed that I
had been mistaken about the expression in his eyes, that he really had made
the offer casually, and had forgotten it. Or regretted it-ouch! And then he
approached me one late afternoon, a man of nearly seventy who was still
broad-shouldered and athletic looking. I was shrugging on my topcoat with
my briefcase between my feet. He said: 'If you'd still like to have a drink at
the club, why not come tonight?' 'Well, I '
'Good.' He slapped a slip of paper into my hand. 'Here's the address.' He
was waiting for me at the foot of the steps that evening, and Stevens held
the door for us. The wine was as excellent as Waterhouse had promised. He
made no attempt whatsoever to 'introduce me around'- I took that for
snobbery but later recanted the idea -but two or three of them introduced
themselves to me. One of those who did so was Emlyn McCarron, even
then in his early seventies. He held out his hand and I clasped it briefly. His
skin was dry, leathery, tough; almost turtlelike. He asked me if I played
bridge. I said I did not.
'God damned good thing,' he said 'That god damned game has done more
in this century to kill intelligent after-dinner conversation than anything else
I can think of.' And with that pronouncement he walked away into the murk
of the library, where shelves of books went up apparently to infinity.
I looked around for Waterhouse, but he had disappeared. Feeling a little
uncomfortable and a lot out of place, I wandered over to the fireplace. It
was, as I believe I have already mentioned, a huge thing-it seemed
particularly huge in New York, where apartment-dwellers such as myself
have trouble imagining such a benevolence big enough to do anything more
than pop corn or toast bread. The fireplace at 249 East 35th was big enough
to broil an ox whole. There was no mantle; instead a brawny stone arch
curved over it This arch was broken in the centre by a keystone which
jutted out slightly. It was just on the level of my eyes, and although the light
was dim, I could read the legend engraved on that stone with no trouble: IT
IS THE TALE, NOT HE WHO TELLS IT. 'Here you go, David,'
Waterhouse said from my elbow, and I jumped. He hadn't deserted me after
all; had only trudged off into some uncharted locale to bring back drinks.
'Bombay martini's yours, isn't it?'
'Yes. Thank you. Mr Waterhouse -'
'George,' he said. 'Here it's just George.'
'George, then,' I said, although it seemed slightly mad to be using his first
name. 'What is all of-'
'Cheers,' he said.
We drank. The martini was perfect. I said so instead of finishing my
question. 'Stevens tends the bar. He makes fine drinks. He likes to say it's a
small but vital skill. ' The martini took the edge off my feelings of
disorientation and awkwardness (the edge, but the feelings themselves
remained- I had spent nearly half an hour gazing into my closet and
wondering what to wear; I had finally settled on dark brown slacks and a
rough tweed jacket that almost matched them, hoping I would not be
wandering into a group of men either turned out in tuxedos or wearing
bluejeans and L. L. Bean's lumberjack shirts it seemed that I hadn't gone
too far wrong on the matter of dress, anyway). A new place and a new
situation makes one crucially aware of every social act, no matter how
small, and at that moment, drink in hand and the obligatory small toast
made, I wanted very much to be sure that I hadn't overlooked any of the
amenities. 'Is there a guest book I ought to sign?' I asked. 'Something like
that?' He looked mildly surprised. 'We don't have anything like that,' he
said. 'At least, I don't think we do.' He glanced around the dim, quiet room.
Johanssen rattled his Wall Street Journal, I saw Stevens pass in a doorway
at the far end of the room, ghostly in his white messjacket. George put his
drink on an endtable and tossed a fresh log onto the fire. Sparks
corkscrewed up the black throat of the chimney.
'What does that mean?' I asked, pointing to the inscription on the
keystone. 'Any idea?' Waterhouse read it carefully, as if for the first time. IT
IS THE TALE, NOT HE WHO TELLS IT.
'I suppose I have an idea,' he said. 'You may, too, if you should come
back. Yes, I should say you may have an idea or two. In time. Enjoy
yourself, David.' He walked away. And, although it may seem odd, having
been left to sink or swim in such an unfamiliar situation, I did enjoy myself.
For one thing, I have always loved books, and there was a trove of
interesting ones to examine here. I walked slowly along the shelves,
examining the spines as best I could in the faint light, pulling one out now
and then, and pausing once to look out a narrow window at the 2nd Avenue
intersection up the street. I stood there and watched through the frost-
rimmed glass as the traffic light at the intersection cycled from red to green
to amber and back to red again, and quite suddenly I felt the queerest-and
yet very welcome -sense of peace come to me. It did not flood in; instead it
seemed to almost steal in. Oh yes, I can hear you saying, that makes great
sense; watching a stop-and-go light gives everyone a sense of peace. All
right; it made no sense. I grant you that. But the feeling was there, just the
same. It made me think for the first time in years of the winter nights in the
Wisconsin farmhouse where I grew up: lying in bed in a draughty upstairs
room and marking the contrast between the whistle of the January wind
outside, drifting snow as dry as sand along miles of snow-fence, and the
warmth my body created under the two quilts. There were some law books,
but they were pretty damn strange: Twenty Cases of Dismemberment and
Their Outcomes under British Law is one title I remember. Pet Cases was
another. I opened that one and sure enough, it was a scholarly legal tome
dealing with the law's treatment (American law, this time) of cases which
bore in some important respect upon pets-everything from housecats that
had inherited great sums of money to an ocelot that had broken its chain
and seriously injured a postman. There was a set of Dickens, a set of Defoe,
a nearly endless set of Trollope; and there was also a set of novels-eleven of
them-by a man named Edward Gray Seville. They were bound in handsome
green leather, and the name of the firm gold-stamped on the spine was
Stedham & Son. I had never heard of Seville nor of his publishers. The
copyright date of the first Seville-These Were Our Brothers-was 1911. The
date of the last, Breakers, was 1935.
Two shelves down from the set of Seville novels was a large folio volume
which contained careful step by step plans for Erector Set enthusiasts. Next
to it was another folio volume which featured famous scenes from famous
movies. Each of these pictures filled one whole page, and opposite each,
filling the facing pages, were free-verse poems either about the scenes with
which they were paired or inspired by them. Not a very remarkable concept,
but the poets who were represented were remarkable-Robert Frost,
Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Louis
Zukofsky, and Erica Jong, to mention just a few. Halfway through the book
I found a poem by Archibald MacLeish set next to that famous photograph
of Marilyn Monroe standing on the subway grating and trying to hold her
skirt down. The poem was titled The Toll' and it began: The shape of the
skirt is -we would say-the shape of a bell The legs are the clapper-And
some such more. Not a terrible poem, but certainly not MacLeish's best or
anywhere near the top drawer. I felt I could hold such an opinion because I
had read a good deal of Archibald MacLeish over the years. I could not,
however, recall this poem about Marilyn Monroe (which it is; the poem
announces it even when divorced from the picture-at the end MacLeish
writes: My legs clap my name: (Marilyn, ma belle). I have looked for it
since then and haven't been able to find it; which means nothing, of
course. Poems are not like novels or legal opinions; they are more like
blown leaves and any omnibus volume titled The Complete So-and-So must
certainly be a lie. Poems have a way of getting lost under sofas-it is one of
their charms, and one of the reasons they endure. But -At some point
Stevens came by with a second martini (by then I had settled into a chair of
my own with a volume of Ezra Pound). It was as perfect as the first. As I
sipped it I saw two of those present, George Gregson and Harry Stein
(Harry was six years dead on the night Emlyn McCarron told us the story of
the Breathing Method), leave the room by a peculiar door less than three
feet high. It was an Alice Down the Rabbit-Hole door if ever there was one.
They left it open, and shortly after their odd exit from the library I heard the
muted click of billiard balls.
Stevens passed by and asked if I would like another martini. I declined
with real regret. He nodded. 'Very good sir.' His face never changed, and yet
I had an obscure feeling that I had somehow pleased him.
Laughter startled me from my book sometime later. Someone had thrown
a packet of chemical powder into the fire and turned the flames
momentarily particoloured. I thought of my boyhood again but not in any
wistful, sloppily romantic-nostalgic way. I feel a great need to emphasize
that, God knows why. I thought of times when I had done just such a thing
as a kid, but the memory was a strong one, pleasant, untinged with regret.
I saw that most of the others had drawn chairs up around the hearth in a
semicircle. Stevens had produced a heaping, smoking platter of marvellous
hot sausages. Harry Stein returned through the down-the-rabbit-hole door,
introducing himself hurriedly but pleasantly to me. Gregson remained in the
billiard room, practising shots, by the sound. After a moment's hesitation I
joined the others. A story was told-not a pleasant one. It was Norman Stett
who told it, and while it is not my purpose to recount it here, perhaps you'll
understand what I mean about its quality if I tell you that it was about a man
who drowned in a telephone booth.
When Stett-who is also dead now-finished, someone said, 'You should
have saved it for Christmas, Norman.' There was laughter, which I of course
did not understand. At least, not then.
Waterhouse himself spoke up then, and such a Waterhouse I never would
have dreamed of in a thousand years of dreaming. A graduate of Yale, a Phi
Beta Kappa, silver-haired, three-piece-suited head of a law firm so large it
was more enterprise than company-this Waterhouse told a story that had to
do with a teacher who had gotten stuck in a privy. The privy stood behind
the one-room schoolhouse in which she had taught, and the day she got her
caboose jammed into one of the privy's two holes also happened to be the
day the privy was scheduled to be taken away as Anniston County's
contribution to the Life As It Was in New England exhibition being held at
the Prudential Center in Boston. The teacher hadn't made a sound during all
the time it took to load the privy onto the back of a flatbed truck and to
spike it down; she was struck dumb with embarrassment and horror,
Waterhouse said. And then the privy door blew off into the passing lane of
Route 128 in Somerville during rush hour-But draw a curtain over that, and
over any other stories which might have followed it; they are not my stories
tonight. At some point Stevens produced a bottle of brandy that was more
than just good; it was damned near exquisite. It was passed around and
Johanssen raised a toast-the toast, one might almost say: The tale, not he
who tells it. We drank to that.
Not long after, men began slipping away. It wasn't late; not yet midnight,
anyway; but I've noticed that when your fifties give way to your sixties, late
begins coming earlier and earlier. I saw Waterhouse slipping his arms into
the overcoat Stevens was holding open for him, and decided that must be
my cue. I thought it strange that Waterhouse would slip away without so
much as a word to me (which certainly seemed to be what he was doing; if I
had come back from shelving the Pound book forty seconds later, he would
have been gone), but no stranger than most of the other things that had gone
on that evening.
I stepped out just behind him, and Waterhouse glanced around, as if
surprised to see me and almost as if he had been startled out of a light
doze. 'Share a taxi?' he asked, as though we had just met by chance on this
deserted, windy street 'Thank you,' I said. I meant thanks for a great deal
more than his offer to share a cab, and I believe that was unmistakable in
my tone, but he nodded as if that was all I had meant.
A taxi with its for-hire light lit was cruising slowly down the street-
fellows like George Waterhouse seem to luck onto cabs even on those
miserably cold or snowy New York nights when you would swear there isn't
a cab to be had on the entire island of Manhattan-and he flagged it.
Inside, safely warm, the taxi-meter charting our journey in measured
clicks, I told him how much I had enjoyed his story. I couldn't remember
laughing so hard or
so spontaneously since I was eighteen, I told him, which was not flattery
but only the simple truth.
'Oh? How kind of you to say.' His voice was chillingly polite. I subsided,
feeling a dull flush in my cheeks. One does not always need to hear a slam
to know that the door has been closed.
When the taxi drew up to the curb in front of my building, I thanked him
again, and this time he showed a trifle more warmth. 'It was good of you to
come on such short notice,' he said. 'Come again, if you like. Don't wait for
an invitation: we don't stand much on ceremony at two-four-nine.
Thursdays are best for stories, but the club is there every night.'
Am I then to assume membership?
The question was on my lips. I meant to ask it; it seemed necessary to ask
it. I was only mulling it over, listening to it in my head (in my tiresome
lawyer's way) to hear if I had got the phrasing right-perhaps that was a little
too blunt-when Waterhouse told the cabbie to drive on. The next moment
the taxi was rolling on towards Madison. I stood there on the sidewalk for a
moment, the hem of my topcoat whipping around my shins, thinking: He
knew I was going to ask that question-he knew it, and he purposely had the
driver go on before I could. Then I told myself that was utterly absurd -
paranoid, even.
And it was. But it was also true. I could scoff all I liked; none of the
scoffing changed that essential certainty.
I walked slowly to the door of my building and went inside.
Ellen was sixty per cent asleep when I sat down on the bed to take off my
shoes. She rolled over and made a fuzzy interrogative sound deep in her
throat. I told her to go back to sleep.
She made the fuzzy sound again. This time approximated English:
'Howwuzzit?'
For a moment I hesitated, my shirt half-unbuttoned. And I thought with
one moment's utter clarity: If I tell her, I will never see the other side of that
door again.
'It was all right,' I said. 'Old men telling war stories.'
'I told you so.'
'But it wasn't bad. I might go back again. It might do me some good with
the
firm.'
'"The firm",' she mocked lightly. 'What an old buzzard you are, my love.'
'It takes one to know one,' I said, but she had already fallen asleep again.
I undressed, showered, towelled, put on my pyjamas and then, instead of
going to bed as I should have done (it was edging past one by that time), I
put on my robe and had another bottle of Beck's. I sat at the kitchen table,
drinking it slowly, looking out the window and up the cold canyon of
Madison Avenue, thinking. My head was a trifle buzzy from my evening's
intake of alcohol-for me an unexpectedly large intake. But the feeling was
not at all unpleasant, and I had no sense of an impending hangover.
The thought which had come to me when Ellen asked me about my
evening was as ridiculous as the one I'd entertained about George
Waterhouse as the cab drew away from me -what in God's name could be
wrong with telling my wife about a perfectly harmless evening at my boss's
stuffy men's club and even if something were wrong with telling her, who
would know that I had? No, it was every bit as ridiculous and paranoid as
those earlier musings and, my heart told me, every bit as true.
I met George Waterhouse the next day in the hallway between Accounts
and the Reading Library. Met him Passed him would be more accurate. He
nodded my way and went on without speaking as he had done for years.
My stomach muscles ached all day long. That was the only thing that
completely convinced me the evening had been real.
Three weeks passed. Four five. No second invitation came from
Waterhouse.
Somehow I just hadn't been right; hadn't fitted. Or so I told myself. It was
a depressing, disappointing thought. I supposed it would begin to fade and
lose its sting, as all disappointments eventually do. But I thought of that
evening at the oddest moments-the isolated pools of library lamplight, so
still and tranquil and somehow civilized; Waterhouse's absurd and hilarious
tale of the schoolteacher stuck in the privy; the rich smell of leather in the
narrow stacks. Most of all I thought of standing by that narrow window and
watching the frost crystals change from green to amber to red. I thought of
that sense of peace I had felt.
During that same five-week period I went to the library and checked out
four volumes of Archibald MacLeish's poetry (I had three others myself,
and had already checked through them); one of these volumes purported to
be The Complete Poems of. I reacquainted myself with some old favourites,
including my favourite MacLeish poem, 'Epistle to Be Left in Earth.' But I
found no poem called 'The Toll' in any of the volumes.
On that same trip to the New York Public Library, I checked the card
catalogue for works of fiction by a man named Edward Gray Seville. A
mystery novel by a woman named Ruth Seville was the closest I came.
Come again, if you like; don't wait for an invitation
I was waiting for an invitation anyway, of course; my mother taught me
donkey's years ago not to automatically believe people who tell you glibly
to 'drop by anytime' or that 'the door is always open'. I didn't feel I needed
an engraved card delivered to my apartment door by a footman in livery
bearing a gilt plate, I don't mean that, but I did want something, even if it
was only a casual remark: 'Coming by some night, David? Hope we didn't
bore you.' That kind of thing.
But when even that didn't come, I began to think more seriously about
going back anyway-after all, sometimes people really did want you to drop
in anytime; I supposed that, at some places, the door always was open; and
that mothers weren't always right.
don't wait for an invitation
Anyway, that's how it happened that, on 10 December of that year, I
found myself putting on my rough tweed coat and dark brown pants again
and looking for my darkish red tie. I was rather more aware of my heartbeat
than usual that night, I remember.
'George Waterhouse finally broke down and asked you back?' Ellen
asked. 'Back into the sty with the rest of the male chauvinist oinkers?'
'That's right,' I said, thinking it must be the first time in at least a dozen
years that I had told her a lie and then I remembered that, after the first
meeting, I had answered her questions about what it had been like with a
lie. Old men telling war stories, I had said.
'Well, maybe there really will be a promotion in it,' she said though
without much hope. To her credit, she said it without much bitterness,
either.
'Stranger things have happened,' I said, and kissed her goodbye.
'Oink-oink,' she said as I went out the door.
The taxi ride that night seemed very long. It was cold, still, and starry.
The cab was a Checker and I felt somehow very small in it, like a child
seeing the city for the first time.
It was excitement I was feeling as the cab pulled up in front of the
brownstone-something as simple and yet complete as that. But such simple
excitement seems to be one of life's qualities that slips away almost
unnoticed, and its rediscovery as one grows older is always something of a
surprise, like finding a black hair or two in one's comb years after one had
last found such a thing.
I paid the driver, got out, and walked towards the four steps leading to the
door. As I mounted them, my excitement curdled into plain apprehension (a
feeling the old are much more familiar with). What exactly was I doing
here?
The door was of thick panelled oak, and to my eye it looked as stout as
the door of a castle keep. There was no doorbell that I could see, no
knocker, no closed circuit TV camera mounted unobtrusively hi the shadow
of a deep eave, and, of course, no Waterhouse waiting to take me in. I
stopped at the foot of the steps and looked around.
Thirty-Fifth Street suddenly seemed darker, colder, more threatening. The
brownstones all looked somehow secret, as if hiding mysteries best not
investigated. Their windows looked like eyes.
Somewhere, behind one of those windows, there may be a man or
woman contemplating murder, I thought. A shudder worked up my spine.
Contemplating it or doing it.
Then, suddenly, the door was open and Stevens was there.
I felt an intense surge of relief. I am not an overly imaginative man, I
think-at least not under ordinary circumstances-but this last thought had had
all the eerie clarity of prophecy. I might have babbled aloud if I hadn't
glanced at Stevens's eyes first. His eyes did not know me. His eyes did not
know me at all.
Then there was another instance of that eerie, prophetic clarity; I saw the
rest of my evening in perfect detail. Three hours in a quiet bar. Three
martinis (perhaps four) to dull the embarrassment of having been fool
enough to go where I wasn't wanted. The humiliation my mother's advice
had been intended to avoid-that which comes with knowing one has
overstepped.
I saw myself going home a little tipsy, but not in a good way. I saw
myself merely sitting through the cab ride rather than experiencing it
through that childlike lens of excitement and anticipation. I heard myself
saying to Ellen, It wears thin after a while Waterhouse told the same story
about winning a consignment of T-bone steaks for the 3rd Battalion in a
poker game and they play Hearts for a dollar a point, can you believe it?
go back? I suppose I might, but I doubt it. And that would be the end of it.
Except, I suppose, for my own humiliation.
I saw all of this in the nothing of Stevens's eyes. Then the eyes warmed.
He smiled slightly and said: 'Mr Adley! Come in. I'll take your coat.'
I mounted the steps and Stevens closed the door firmly behind me. How
different a door can feel when you are on the warm side of it! He took my
coat and was gone with it. I stood in the hall for a moment, looking at my
own reflection in the pier glass, a man of sixty-three whose face was rapidly
becoming too gaunt to look middle-aged. And yet the reflection pleased me.
I slipped into the library.
Johanssen was there, reading his Wall Street Journal. In another island of
light, Emlyn McCarron sat over a chessboard opposite Peter Andrews.
McCarron was and is a cadaverous man, possessed of a narrow, bladelike
nose; Andrews was huge, slope-shouldered, and choleric. A vast ginger-
coloured beard sprayed over his vest.
Face to face over the inlaid board with its carved pieces of ivory and
ebony, they looked like Indian totems: eagle and bear.
Waterhouse was there, frowning over that day's Times. He glanced up,
nodded at me without surprise, and disappeared into the paper again.
Stevens brought me a Bombay martini, unasked.
I took it into the stacks and found that puzzling, enticing set of green
volumes again. I began reading the works of Edward Gray Seville that
night. I started at the beginning, with These Were Our Brothers. Since then I
have read them all, and believe them to be eleven of the finest novels of our
century.
Near the end of the evening there was a story -just one -and Stevens
brought brandy around. When the tale was told, people began to rise,
preparing to leave. Stevens spoke from the double doorway which
communicated with the hallway. His voice was low and pleasant, but
carrying: 'Who will bring us a tale for Christmas, then?'
People stopped what they were doing and glanced around. There was
some low, goodnatured talk and a burst of laughter.
Stevens, smiling but serious, clapped his hands together twice, like a
grammar school teacher calling an unruly class to order. 'Come, gentlemen-
who'll bring the tale?' Peter Andrews, he of the sloped shoulders and
gingery beard, cleared his throat. 'I have something I've been thinking about
I don't know if it's quite right; that is, if it's
'That will be fine,' Stevens interrupted, and there was more laughter.
Andrews had his back slapped good naturedly. Cold draughts swirled up the
hallway as men slipped out. Then Stevens was there, as if by benign magic,
holding my coat for me. 'Good evening, Mr Adley. Always a pleasure.'
'Do you really meet on Christmas night?' I asked, buttoning my coat I
was a little disappointed that I was going to miss Andrews's story, but we
had made firm plans to drive to Schenectady and keep the holiday with
Ellen's sister.
Stevens managed to look both shocked and amused at the same time. 'In
no case,' he said. 'Christmas is a night a man should spend with his family.
That night, if no other. Don't you agree, sir?'
'I certainly do.'
'We always meet on the Thursday before Christmas. In fact, that is the
one night of the year when we're assured a large turnout.'
He hadn't used the word members, I noticed-just happenstance or neat
avoidance? 'Many tales have been spun out in the main room, Mr Adley,
tales of every sort, from the comic to the tragic to the ironic to the
sentimental. But on the Thursday before Christmas, it's always a tale of the
uncanny. It's always been that way, at least as far back as I can remember.'
That at least explained the comment I had heard on my first visit, the one
to the effect that Norman Stett should have saved his story for Christmas.
Other questions hovered on my lips, but I saw a reflected caution in
Stevens's eyes. Do you catch my drift? It was not a warning that he would
not answer my questions; it was, rather, a warning that I should not even
ask them.
'Was there something else, Mr Adley?'
We were alone in the hall now. All the others had left And suddenly the
hallway seemed darker, Stevens's long face paler, his lips redder. A knot
exploded in the fireplace and a red glow washed momentarily across the
polished parquet floor. I thought I heard, from somewhere in those as-yet-
unexplored rooms beyond, a kind of slithery bump. I did not like the sound.
Not at all.
'No,' I said in a voice that was not quite steady. 'I think not.'
'Goodnight, then,' Stevens said, and I crossed the threshold. I heard the
heavy door close behind me. I heard the lock turn. And then I was walking
towards the lights of 2nd Avenue, not looking back over my shoulder,
somehow afraid to look back, as if I might see some frightful fiend
matching me stride for stride, or glimpse some secret better kept than
known. I reached the corner, saw an empty cab, and flagged it. 'More war
stories?' Ellen asked me that night She was in bed with Philip Marlowe, the
only lover she has ever taken.
"There was a war story or two,' I said, hanging up my overcoat. 'Mostly I
sat and read a book.'
'When you weren't oinking.'
'Yes, that's right. When I wasn't oinking.'
'Listen to this: "The first time I ever laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was
drunk in a Rolls-Royce Stiver Wraith outside the terrace of the Dancers,"'
Ellen read.' "He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You
could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he
looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been
spending too much money in a place that exists for that purpose and for no
other." Nice, huh? It's -'
'The Long Goodbye' I said, taking off my shoes. 'You read me that same
passage once every three years. It's part of your life-cycle.'
She wrinkled her nose at me. 'Oink-oink.'
'Thank you,' I said.
She went back to her book. I went out into the kitchen to get a bottle of
Beck's. When I came back, she had laid The Long Goodbye open on the
counterpane and was looking at me closely. 'David, are you going to join
this club?'
'I suppose I might if I'm asked.' I felt uncomfortable. I had perhaps told
her another lie. If there was such a thing as membership at 249 East 35 th, I
already was a member. 'I'm glad,' she said. 'You've needed something for a
long time now. I don't think you even know it, but you have. I've got the
Relief Committee and the Commission on Women's Rights and the Theatre
Society. But you've needed something. Some people to grow old with, I
think.'
I went to the bed and sat beside her and picked up The Long Goodbye. It
was a bright, new-minted paperback. I could remember buying the original
hardback edition as a birthday present for Ellen. In 1953. 'Are we old?' I
asked her.
'I suspect we are,' she said, and smiled brilliantly at me.
I put the book down and touched her breast. 'Too old for this?'
She turned the covers back with ladylike decorum and then, giggling,
kicked them onto the floor with her feet. 'Beat me, daddy,' Ellen said, 'eight
to the bar.'
'Oink, oink,' I said, and then we were both laughing.
The Thursday before Christmas came. That evening was much the same
as the others, with two notable exceptions. There were more people there,
perhaps as many as eighteen.
And there was a sharp, indefinable sense of excitement in the air.
Johansson took only a cursory glance at his Journal and then joined
McCarron, Hugh Beagleman, and myself.
We sat near the windows, talking of this and that, and finally fell into a
passionate-and often hilarious-discussion of pre-war automobiles.
There was, now that I think of it, a third difference as well-Stevens had
concocted a delicious eggnog punch. It was smooth, but it was also hot with
rum and spices. It was served from an incredible Waterford bowl that
looked like an ice-sculpture, and the animated hum of the conversation
grew ever higher as the level of the punch grew lower.
I looked over in the corner by the tiny door leading to the billiard room
and was astounded to see Waterhouse and Norman Stett flipping baseball
cards into what looked like a genuine beaver tophat. They were laughing
uproariously.
Groups formed and re-formed. The hour grew late and then, at the time
when people usually began slipping out through the front door, I saw Peter
Andrews seated in front of the fire with an unmarked packet, about the size
of a seed envelope, in one hand. He tossed it into the flames without
opening it, and a moment later the fire began to dance with every colour of
the spectrum-and some, I would have sworn, from outside it-before turning
yellow again. Chairs were dragged around. Over Andrews's shoulder I
could see the keystone with its etched homily: IT IS THE TALE, NOT HE
WHO TELLS IT.
Stevens passed unobtrusively among us, taking punch glasses and
replacing them with snifters of brandy. There were murmurs of 'Merry
Christmas' and 'Top of the season, Stevens,' and for the first time I saw
money change hands-a ten dollar bill was unobtrusively tendered here, a
bill that looked like a fifty there, one which I clearly saw was a hundred
from another chair.
"Thank you, Mr McCarron Mr Johansson Mr Beagleman' A quiet,
well-bred murmur.
I have lived in New York long enough to know that the Christmas season
is a carnival of tips; something for the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-
maker-not to mention the doorman, the super, and the cleaning lady who
comes in Tuesdays and Fridays. I've never met anyone of my own class
who regarded this as anything but a necessary nuisance but I felt none of
that grudging spirit on that night. The money was given willingly, even
eagerly and suddenly, for no reason (it was the way thoughts often seemed
to come when one was at 249), I thought of the boy calling up to Scrooge
on the still, cold air of a London Christmas morning: 'Wot? The goose that's
as big as me?' And Scrooge, nearly crazed with joy, giggling 'A good boy!
An excellent boy!'
I found my own wallet. In the back of this, behind the pictures of Ellen I
keep, there has always been a fifty dollar bill which I keep for emergencies.
When Stevens gave me my brandy, I slipped it into his hand with never a
qualm although I was not a rich man. 'Happy Christmas, Stevens,' I said.
'Thank you, sir. And the same to you.'
He finished passing out the brandies and collecting his honorariums and
retired. I glanced around once, at the midpoint of Peter Andrews's story, and
saw him standing by the double doors, a dim manlike shadow, still and
silent.
'I'm a lawyer now, as most of you know,' Andrews said after sipping at
his glass, clearing his throat, and then sipping again. 'I've had offices on
Park Avenue for the last twenty-two years. But before that, I was a legal
assistant in a firm of lawyers which did business in Washington, DC. One
night in July I was required to stay late in order to finish indexing case
citations in a brief which hasn't anything at all to do with this story. But
then a man came in- a man who was at that time one of the most widely
known Senators on the Hill, a man who later almost became President. His
shirt was matted with blood and his eyes were bulging from their sockets.
'"I've got to talk to Joe," he said. Joe, you understand, was Joseph Woods,
the head of my firm, one of the most influential private-sector lawyers in
Washington, and this Senator's close personal friend.
'"He went home hours ago," I said. I was terribly frightened, I can tell
you-he looked like a man who had just walked away from a dreadful car
accident, or perhaps from a knife-fight And somehow seeing his face which
I had seen in newspaper photos and on Meet the Press-seeing it streaked
with gore, one cheek twitching spasmodically below one wild eye all of
that made my fright worse. "I can call him if you -" I was already fumbling
with the phone, mad with eagerness to turn this unexpected responsibility
over to someone else. Looking behind him, I could see the caked and
bloody footprints he had left on the carpet ' "I've got to talk to Joe right
now," he reiterated as if he hadn't heard me.' "There's something in the trunk
of my car something I found out at the Virginia place. I've shot it and
stabbed it and I can't kill it. It's not human, and I can't kill it" 'He began to
giggle and then to laugh and finally to scream. And he was still
screaming when I finally got Mr Woods on the phone and told him to come,
for God's sake, to come as fast as he could '
It is not my purpose to tell Peter Andrews's story, either. As a matter of
fact, I am not sure I would dare to tell it. Suffice it to say that it was a tale
so gruesome that I dreamed of it for weeks afterwards, and Ellen once
looked at me over the breakfast table and asked me why I had suddenly
cried out 'His head! His head is still speaking in the earth!' in the middle of
the night 'I suppose it was a dream,' I said. 'One of those you can't
remember afterwards.' But my eyes dropped immediately to my coffee cup,
and I think that Ellen knew the lie that time.
One day in August of the following year, I was buzzed as I worked in the
Readers Library. It was George Waterhouse. He asked me if I could step up
to his office. When I got there I saw that Robert Garden was also there, and
Henry Effingham. For one moment I was positive I was about to be accused
of some really dreadful act of stupidity or malfeasance.
Then Garden stepped around to me and said: 'George believes the time
has come to make you a junior partner, David. The rest of us agree.'
'It's going to be a little bit like being the world's oldest JayCee,'
Effingham said with a grin, 'but it's the channel you have to go through,
David. With any luck, we can make you a full partner by Christmas.'
There were no bad dreams that night. Ellen and I went out to dinner,
drank too much, went on to a jazz place where we hadn't been in nearly six
years, and listened to that amazing blue-eyed black man, Dexter Gordon,
blow his horn until almost two in the morning. We woke up the next
morning with fluttery stomachs and achey heads, both of us still unable to
completely believe what had happened. One of them was that my salary had
just climbed by eight thousand dollars a year long after our expectations of
such a staggering income jump had fallen by the wayside.
The firm sent me to Copenhagen for six weeks that fall, and I returned to
discover that John Hanrahan, one of the regular attendees at 249, had died
of cancer. A collection was taken up for his wife, who had been left in
unpleasant circumstances. I was pressed into service to total the amount-
which was given entirely in cash-and convert it to a cashier's check. It came
to almost ten thousand dollars. I turned the check over to Stevens and I
suppose he mailed it.
It just so happened that Arlene Hanrahan was a member of Ellen's
Theatre Society, and Ellen told me some time later that Arlene had received
an anonymous check for ten thousand four hundred dollars. Written on the
check stub was the brief and unilluminating message 'Friends of your late
husband John'.
'Isn't that the most amazing thing you ever heard in your life?' Ellen
asked me.
'No,' I said, 'but it's right up there in the top ten. Are there any more
strawberries, Ellen?'
The years went by. I discovered a warren of rooms upstairs at 249-a
writing room, a bedroom where guests sometimes stayed overnight
(although after that slithery bump I had heard-or imagined I had heard- I
believe I personally would rather have registered at a good hotel), a small
but well-equipped gymnasium, and a sauna bath. There was also a long,
narrow room which ran the length of the building and contained two
bowling alleys.
In those same years I re-read the novels of Edward Gray Seville, and
discovered an absolutely stunning poet-the equal of Ezra Pound and
Wallace Stevens, perhaps-named Norbert Rosen. According to the back flap
on one of the three volumes of his work in the stacks, he had been born in
1924 and killed at Anzio. All three volumes of his work had been published
by Stedham & Son, New York and Boston.
I remember going back to the New York Public Library on a bright spring
afternoon during one of those years (of which year I am no longer sure) and
requesting twenty years' worth of Literary Market Place. The LMP is an
annual publication the size of a large city's Yellow Pages, and the reference
room librarian was quite put out with me, I'm afraid. But I persisted, and
went through each volume carefully. And although LMP is supposed to list
every publisher, great and small, in the United States (in addition to agents,
editors, and book club staffs), I found no listing for Stedham & Son. A year
later-or perhaps it was two years later- I fell into conversation with an
antiquarian book dealer and asked him about the imprint. He said he had
never heard of it.
I thought of asking Stevens-saw that warning light in his eyes-and
dropped the question unasked.
And, over those years, there were stories. Tales, to use Stevens's word.
Funny tales, tales of love found and love lost, tales of unease. Yes, and even
a few war stories, although none of the sort Ellen had likely been thinking
of when she made the suggestion.
I remember Gerard Tozeman's story the most clearly-the tale of an
American base of operations which took a direct hit from German artillery
four months before the end of World War I, killing everyone present except
for Tozeman himself.
Lathrop Carruthers, the American general who everyone had by then
decided must be utterly insane (he had been responsible for better than
eighteen thousand casualties by then-lives and limbs spent as casually as
you or I might spend a quarter in a jukebox), was standing at a map of the
front lines when the shell struck. He had been explaining yet another mad
flanking operation at that moment-an operation which would have
succeeded only on the level of all the others Carruthers had hatched: it
would be wonderfully successful at making new widows.
And when the dust cleared, Gerard Tozeman, dazed and deaf, bleeding
from his nose, his ears, and the corners of both eyes, his testicles already
swelling from the force of the concussion, had come upon Carruthers's body
while looking for a way out of the abbatoir that had been the staff HQ only
minutes before. He looked at the general's body and then began to scream
and laugh. The sounds went unheard by his own shellshocked ears, but they
served to notify the medicos that someone was still alive in that strew of
matchwood.
Carruthers had not been mutilated by the blast at least, Tozeman said, it
hadn't been what the soldiers of that long-ago war had come to think of as
mutilation-men whose arms had been blown off, men with no feet, no eyes;
men whose lungs
had been shrivelled by gas. No, he said, it was nothing like that The
man's mother would have known him at once. But the map
the map before which Carruthers had been standing with his butcher's
pointer when the shell struck
It had somehow been driven into his face. Tozeman had found himself
staring into a hideous, tattooed deathmask. Here was the stony shore of
Brittany on the bony ridge of Lathrop Carruthers's brow. Here was the
Rhine flowing like a blue scar down his left cheek. Here were some or the
finest wine-growing provinces in the world bumped and ridged over his
chin. Here was the Saar drawn around his throat like a hangman's noose
and printed across one bulging eyeball was the word VERSAILLES.
That was our Christmas story in the year 197-.
I remember many others, but they do not belong here. Properly speaking,
Tozeman's doesn't, either but it was the first 'Christmas tale' I heard at 249,
and I could not resist telling it. And then, on the Thursday after
Thanksgiving of this year, when Stevens clapped his hands together for
attention and asked who would favour us with a Christmas tale, Emlyn
McCarron growled: 'I suppose I've got something that bears telling. Tell it
now or tell it never; God'll shut me up for good soon enough.'
In the years I had been coming to 249, I had never heard McCarron tell a
story. And perhaps that's why I called the taxi so early, and why, when
Stevens passed out eggnog to the six of us who had ventured out on that
bellowing, frigid night, I felt so keenly excited. Nor was I the only one; I
saw that same excitement on a good many other faces. McCarron, old and
dry and leathery, sat in the huge chair by the fire with the packet of powder
in his gnarled hands. He tossed it in, and we watched the flames shift
colours madly before returning to yellow again, Stevens passed among us
with brandy, and we passed him his Christmas honorariums. Once, during
that yearly ceremony, I heard the clink of change passing from the hand of
the giver to the hand of the receiver; on another occasion, I had seen a one
thousand dollar bill for a moment in the firelight. On both occasions the
murmur of Stevens's voice had been exactly the same: low, considerate, and
entirely correct. Ten years, more or less, had passed since I had first come
to 249 with George Waterhouse, and while much had changed in the world
outside, nothing had changed in here, and Stevens seemed not to have aged
a month, or even a single day. He moved back into the shadows, and for a
moment there was a silence so perfect that we could hear the faint whistle
of boiling sap escaping from the burning logs on the hearth. Emlyn
McCarron was looking into the fire and we all followed his gaze. The
flames seemed particularly wild that night. I felt almost hypnotized by the
sight of the fire-as, I suppose, the cavemen who binned us were once
hypnotized by it as the wind walked and talked outside their cold northern
caves.
At last, still looking into the fire, bent slightly forward so that his
forearms rested on his thighs and his clasped hands hung in a knot between
his knees, McCarron began to speak.
2: The Breathing Method
I am nearly eighty now, which means that I was born with the century.
All my life I have been associated with a building which stands almost
directly across from Madison Square Garden; this building, which looks
like a great grey prison -something out of A Tale of Two Cities-is actually a
hospital, as most of you know. It
is Harriet White Memorial Hospital. The Harriet White after whom it
was named was my father's first wife, and she got her practical experience
in nursing when there were still actual sheep grazing on the Sheep's
Meadow in Central Park. A statue of the lady herself (who would have been
my stepmother, had she still been alive when I was born) stands on a
pedestal in a pavillion before the building, and if any of you have seen it,
you may have wondered how a woman with such a stern and
uncompromising face could have found such a gentle occupation. The
motto chiselled into the statue's base, once you get rid of the Latin folderol,
is even less comforting: There is no comfort without pain; thus we define
salvation through suffering. Cato, if you please or if you don't please! I
was born inside that grey stone building on 20 March, 1900. I returned there
as an intern in the year 1926. Twenty-six is old to be just starting out in the
world of medicine, but I had done a more practical internship in France, at
the end of World War I, trying to pack ruptured guts back into stomachs that
had been blown wide open and dealing on the black market for morphine
which was often tinctured and sometimes dangerous. As with the generation
of physicians following World War II, we were a bedrock-practical lot of
sawbones, and the records of the major medical schools show a remarkably
small number of washouts in the years 1919 to 1928. We were older, more
experienced, steadier. Were we also wiser? I don't know but we were
certainly more cynical. There was none of this nonsense you read about in
the popular medical novels, stuff about fainting or vomiting at one's first
autopsy. Not after Belleau Wood, where mamma rats sometimes raised
whole litters of ratlings in the gas-exploded intestines of the soldiers left to
rot in no-man's land. We had gotten all our puking and passing out behind
us.
The Harriet White Memorial Hospital also figured largely in something
that happened to me nine years after I had interned there-and this is the
story I want to tell you gentlemen tonight. It is not a tale to be told at
Christmas, you would say (although its final scene was played out on
Christmas Eve), and yet, while it is certainly horrible, it also seems to
express to me all the amazing power of our cursed, doomed species. In it I
see the wonder of our will and also its horrible, tenebrous power.
Birth itself, gentlemen, is a horrid thing to many; it is the fashion now
that fathers should be present at the birth of their children, and while this
fashion has served to indict many men with a guilt which I feel they may
not deserve (it is a guilt which some women use knowingly and with an
almost prescient cruelty), it seems by and large to be a healthful, salubrious
thing. Yet I have seen men leave the delivery room white and tottering and I
have seen them swoon like girls, overcome by the cries and the blood. I
remember one father who held up just fine only to begin screaming
hysterically as his perfectly healthy son pushed its way into the world. The
infant's eyes were open, it gave the impression of looking around and then
its eyes settled on the father. Birth is wonderful, gentlemen, but I have
never found it beautiful-not by any stretch of the imagination. I believe it is
too brutal to be beautiful. A woman's womb is like an engine. With
conception, that engine is turned on. At first it barely idles but as the
creative cycle nears the climax of birth, that engine revs up and up and up.
Its idling whisper becomes a steady running hum, and then a rumble, and
finally a bellowing, frightening roar. Once that silent engine has been turned
on, every mother-to-be understands that her life is in check. Either she will
bring the baby forth and the engine will shut down again, or that engine will
pound louder and harder and faster until it explodes, killing her in blood
and pain.
This is a story of birth, gentlemen, on the eve of that birth we have
celebrated for almost two thousand years.
I began practising medicine in 1929-a bad year to begin anything. My
grandfather was able to loan me a small sum of money, so I was luckier
than many of my colleagues, but I still had to survive over the next four
years mostly on my wits.
By 1935, things had improved a bit. I had developed a bedrock of steady
patients and was getting quite a few outpatient referrals from White
Memorial. In April of that year I saw a new patient, a young woman whom
I will call Sandra Stansfield-that name is close enough to what her name
really was. This was a young woman, white, who stated her age to be
twenty-eight. After examining her, I guessed her true age to be between
three and five years younger than that. She was blonde, slender, and tall for
that time-about five feet eight inches. She was quite beautiful, but in an
austere way that was almost forbidding. Her features were clear and regular,
her eyes intelligent and her mouth every bit as determined as the stone
mouth of Harriet White on the statue in the pavilion across from Madison
Square Garden. The name she put on her form was not Sandra Stansfield
but Jane Smith. My examination subsequently showed her to be about two
months gone in pregnancy. She wore no wedding ring. After the
preliminary exam-but before the results of the pregnancy test were in, my
nurse, Ella Davidson, said: "That girl yesterday? Jane Smith? If that isn't an
assumed name, I never heard one.'
I agreed. Still, I rather admired her. She had not engaged in the usual
shillyshallying, toe-scuffing, blushing, tearful behaviour. She had been
straightforward and businesslike.
Even her alias had seemed more a matter of business than of shame.
There had been no attempt to provide verisimilitude by creating a 'Betty
Rucklehouse' or whomping up a 'Ternina DeVille'. You require a name for
your form, she seemed to be saying, because that is the law. So here is a
name; but rather than trusting to the professional ethics of a man I don't
know, I'll trust in myself. If you don't mind, Ella sniffed and passed a few
remarks-'modern girls' and 'bold as brass'-but she was a good woman, and I
don't think she said those things except for the sake of form. She knew as
well as I did that, whatever my new patient might be, she was no little
trollop with hard eyes and round heels. No; 'Jane Smith' was merely an
extremely serious, extremely determined young woman-if either of those
things can be described by such a milquetoast adverb as 'merely'. It was an
unpleasant situation (it used to be called 'getting in a scrape', as you
gentlemen may remember; nowadays it seems that many young women use
a scrape to get out of the scrape), and she meant to go through it with
whatever grace and dignity she could manage.
A week after her initial appointment, she came in again. That was a peach
of a day-one of the first real days of spring. The air was mild, the sky a soft,
milky shade of blue, and there was a smell on the breeze- a warm,
indefinable smell that seems to be nature's signal that she is entering her
own birth cycle again. The sort of day when you wish you were miles from
any responsibility, sitting opposite a lovely woman of your own-at Coney
Island, maybe, or on the Palisades across the Hudson with a picnic hamper
on a checkered cloth and the lady in question wearing a great white
cartwheel hat and a sleeveless gown as pretty as the day.
'Jane Smith's' dress had sleeves, but it was still almost as pretty as the
day; a smart white linen with brown edging. She wore brown pumps, white
gloves, and a cloche hat that was slightly out of fashion-it was the first sign
I saw that she was a far from rich woman.
'You're pregnant,' I said. 'I don't believe you doubted it much, did you?'
If there are to be tears, I thought, they will come now.
'No,' she said with perfect composure. There was no more a sign of tears
in her eyes than there were rainclouds on the horizon that day. 'I'm very
regular as a rule.'
There was a pause between us.
'When may I expect to deliver?' she asked then, with an almost soundless
sigh. It was the sound a man or woman might make before bending over to
pick up a heavy load.
'It will be a Christmas baby,' I said. '10 December is the date I'l1 give
you, but it could be two weeks on either side of that'
'All right.' She hesitated briefly, and then plunged ahead. 'Will you attend
me? Even though I'm not married?'
'Yes,' I said. 'On one condition.'
She frowned, and in that moment her face was more like the face of
Harriet White, my father's first wife, than ever. One would not think that the
frown of a woman perhaps only twenty-three could be particularly
formidable, but this one was. She was ready to leave, and the fact that she
would have to go through this entire embarrassing process again with
another doctor was not going to deter her.
'And what might that be?' she asked with perfect, colourless courtesy.
Now it was I who felt an urge to drop my eyes from her steady hazel
ones, but I held her gaze. 'I insist upon knowing your real name. We can
continue to do business on a cash basis if that is how you prefer it, and I can
continue to have Mrs Davidson issue you receipts in the name of Jane
Smith. But if we are going to travel through the next seven months or so
together, I would like to be able to address you by the name to which you
answer in all the rest of your life.'
I finished this absurdly stiff little speech and watched her think it
through. I was somehow quite sure she was going to stand up, thank me for
my time, and leave forever. I was going to feel disappointed if that
happened. I liked her. Even more, I liked the straightforward way she was
handling a problem which would have reduced ninety women out of a
hundred to inept and undignified liars, terrified by the living clock within
and so deeply ashamed of their situation that to make any reasonable plan
for coping with it became impossible.
I suppose many young people today would find such a state of mind
ludicrous, ugly, even hard to believe. People have become so eager to
demonstrate their broad-mindedness that a pregnant woman who has no
wedding ring is apt to be treated with twice the solicitude of one who does.
You gentlemen will well remember when rectitude and hypocrisy were
combined to make a situation that was viciously difficult for a woman who
had gotten herself 'in a scrape'. In those days, a married pregnant woman
was a radiant woman, sure of her position and proud of fulfilling what she
considered to be the function God put her on earth for. An unmarried
pregnant woman was a trollop in the eyes of the world and apt to be a
trollop in her own eyes as well. They were, to use Ella Davidson's word,
'easy', and in that world and that time, easiness was not quickly forgiven.
Such women crept away to have their babies in other towns or cities. Some
took pills or jumped from buildings. Others went to butcher abortionists
with dirty hands or tried to do the job themselves; in my time as a physician
I have seen four women die of blood-loss before my eyes as the result of
punctured wombs-in one case the puncturing was done by the jagged neck
of a Dr Pepper bottle that had been tied to the handle of a whisk-broom. It is
hard to believe now that such things happened, but they did, gentlemen.
They did. It was, quite simply, the worst situation a healthy young woman
could find herself in.
'All right' she said at last. 'That's fair enough. My name is Sandra
Stansfield.' And she held her hand out. Rather amazed, I took it and shook
it. I'm rather glad Ella
Davidson didn't see me do that. She would have made no comment, but
the coffee would have been bitter for the next week.
She smiled-at my own expression of bemusement, I imagine-and looked
at me frankly.
'I hope we can be friends, Dr McCarron. I need a friend just now. I'm
quite frightened.'
'I can understand that, and I'll try to be your friend if I can, Miss
Stansfield. Is there anything I can do for you now?'
She opened her handbag and took out a dime-store pad and a pen. She
opened the pad, poised the pen, and looked up at me. For one horrified
instant I believed she was going to ask me for the name and address of an
abortionist. Then she said: 'I'd like to know the best things to eat. For the
baby, I mean.'
I laughed out loud. She looked at me with some amazement.
'Forgive me-it's just that you seem so businesslike.'
'I suppose,' she said. 'This baby is part of my business now, isn't it, Dr
McCarron?'
'Yes. Of course it is. And I have a folder which I give to all my pregnant
patients. It deals with diet and weight and drinking and smoking and lots of
other things. Please don't laugh when you look at it. You'll hurt my feelings
if you do, because I wrote it myself.'
And so I had-although it was really more of a pamphlet than a folder, and
in time became my book, A Practical Guide to Pregnancy and Delivery. I
was quite interested in obstetrics and gynaecology in those days-still am -
although it was not a thing to specialize in back then unless you had plenty
of uptown connections. Even if you did, it might take ten or fifteen years to
establish a strong practice. Having hung out my shingle at a rather too-ripe
age as a result of the war, I didn't feel I had the time to spare. I contented
myself with the knowledge that I would see a great many happy expectant
mothers and deliver a great many babies in the course of my general
practice. And so I did; at last count I had delivered well over two thousand
babies -enough to fill two hundred classrooms.
I kept up with the literature on having babies more smartly than I did on
that applying to any other area of general practice. And because my
opinions were strong, enthusiastic ones, I wrote my own pamphlet rather
than just passing along the stale chestnuts so often foisted on young
mothers then. I won't run through the whole catalogue of these chestnuts-
we'd be here all night-but I'll mention a couple.
Expectant mothers were urged to stay off their feet as much as possible,
and on no account were they to walk any sustained distance lest a
miscarriage or 'birth damage' result. Now giving birth is an extremely
strenuous piece of work, and such advice is like telling a football player to
prepare for the big game by sitting around as much as possible so he won't
tire himself out! Another sterling piece of advice, given by a good many
doctors, was that moderately overweight mothers-to-be take up smoking
smoking! The rationale was perfectly expressed by an advertising slogan of
the day: 'Have a Lucky instead of a sweet.' People who have the idea that
when we entered the twentieth century we also entered an age of medical
light and reason have no idea of how utterly crazy medicine could
sometimes be. Perhaps it's just as well; their hair would turn white.
I gave Miss Stansfield my folder and she looked through it with complete
attention for perhaps five minutes. I asked her permission to smoke my pipe
and she gave it absently, without looking up. When she did look up at last,
there was a small smile on her lips. 'Are you a radical, Dr McCarron?' she
asked.
'Why do you say that? Because I advise that the expectant mother should
walk her round of errands instead of riding in a smoky, jolting subway car?'
' "Pre-natal vitamins," whatever they are swimming recommended and
breathing exercises! What breathing exercises?'
'That comes later on, and no-I'm not a radical. Far from it What I am is
five minutes overdue on my next patient.'
'Oh! I'm sorry.' She got to her feet quickly, tucking the thick folder into
her
purse.
'No need.'
She shrugged into her light coat, looking at me with those direct hazel
eyes as she did so.
'No,' she said. 'Not a radical at all. I suspect you're actually quite
comfortable? Is that the word I want?'
'I hope it will serve,' I said. 'It's a word I like. If you speak to Mrs
Davidson, shell give you an appointment schedule. I'll want to see you
again early next month.'
'Your Mrs Davidson doesn't approve of me.'
'Oh, I'm sure that's not true at all.' But I've never been a particularly good
liar, and the warmth between us suddenly slipped away. I did not
accompany her to the door of my consulting room. 'Miss Stansfield?' She
turned towards me, coolly enquiring. 'Do you intend to keep the baby?'
She considered me briefly and then smiled- a secret smile which I am
convinced only pregnant women know. 'Oh yes,' she said, and let herself
out. By the end of that day I had treated identical twins for identical cases
of poison ivy, lanced a boil, removed a hook of metal from a sheet-welder's
eye, and had referred one of my oldest patients to White Memorial for what
was surely cancer. I had forgotten all about Sandra Stansfield by then. Ella
Davidson recalled her to my mind by saying: 'Perhaps she's not a chippie
after all.'
I looked up from my last patient's folder. I had been looking at it, feeling
that useless disgust most doctors feel when they know they have been
rendered completely helpless, and thinking I ought to have a rubber stamp
made up for such files-only instead of saying ACCOUNT RECEIVABLE or
PAID IN FULL or PATIENT MOVED, it would simply say DEATH-
WARRANT. Perhaps with a skull and crossbones above, like those on
bottles of poison. 'Pardon me?'
'Your Miss Jane Smith. She did a most peculiar thing after her
appointment this morning.' The set of Mrs Davidson's head and mouth
made it clear that this was the sort of peculiar thing of which she approved.
'And what was that?'
'When I gave her her appointment card, she asked me to tot up her
expenses. All of her expenses. Delivery and hospital stay included.'
That was a peculiar thing, all right. This was 1935, remember, and Miss
Stansfield gave every impression of being a woman on her own. Was she
well off, even comfortably off? I didn't think so. Her dress, shoes, and
gloves had all been smart, but she had worn no jewellery -not even costume
jewellery. And then there was her hat, that decidedly out-of-date cloche.
'Did you do it?' I asked.
Mrs Davidson looked at me as though I might have lost my senses. 'Did
I? Of course I did! And she paid the entire amount. In cash.'
The last, which apparently had surprised Mrs Davidson the most (in an
extremely pleasant way, of course), surprised me not at all. One thing which
the Jane Smiths of the world can't do is write cheques.
Took a bank-book out of her purse, opened it, and counted the money
right out onto my desk,' Mrs Davidson was continuing. Then she put her
receipt in where the
cash had been, put the bank-book into her purse again, and said good day.
Not half bad, when you think of the way we've had to chase some of these
so-called "respectable" people to make them pay their bills!'
I felt chagrined for some reason. I was not happy with the Stansfield
woman for having done such a thing, with Mrs Davidson for being so
pleased and complacent with the arrangement, and with myself, for some
reason I couldn't define then and can't now. Something about it made me
feel small. 'But she couldn't very well pay for a hospital stay now, could
she?' I asked-it was a ridiculously small thing to seize on, but it was all I
could find at that moment on which to express my pique and half-amused
frustration. 'After all, none of us know how long shell have to remain there.
Or are you reading the crystal now, Ella?'
'I told her that very thing, and she asked what the average stay was
following an uncomplicated birth. I told her three days. Wasn't that right, Dr
McCarron?'
I had to admit it was.
'She said that she would pay for three days, then, and if it was longer, she
would pay the difference, and if-'
'- if it was shorter, we could issue her a refund,' I finished wearily. I
thought: Damn the woman, anyway!-and then I laughed. She had guts. One
couldn't deny that. All kinds of guts.
Mrs Davidson allowed herself a smile and if I am ever tempted, now
that I am in my dotage, to believe I know all there is to know about one of
my fellow creatures, I try to remember that smile. Before that day I would
have staked my iife that I would never see Mrs Davidson, one of the most
'proper' women I have ever known, smile fondly as she thought about a girl
who was pregnant out of wedlock.
'Guts? I don't know, Doctor. But she knows her own mind, that one. She
certainly does.'
A month passed, and Miss Stansfield showed up promptly for her
appointment, simply appearing out of that wide, amazing flow of humanity
that was New York then and is New York now. She wore a fresh-looking
blue dress to which she managed to communicate a feeling of originality, of
one-of-a-kind-ness, despite the fact that it had been quite obviously picked
from a rack of dozens just like it. Her pumps did not match it; they were the
same brown ones in which I had seen her last time.
I checked her over carefully and found her normal in every way. I told
her so and she was pleased. 'I found the pre-natal vitamins, Dr McCarron.'
'Did you? That's good.'
Her eyes sparkled impishly. "The druggist advised me against them.'
'God save me from pestle-pounders,' I said, and she giggled against the
heel of her palm-it was a childlike gesture, winning in its
unselfconsciousness. 'I never met a druggist that wasn't a frustrated doctor.
And a Republican. Pre-natal vitamins are new, so they're regarded with
suspicion. Did you take his advice?'
'No, I took yours. You're my doctor.'
Thank you.'
'Not at all.' She looked at me straightforwardly, not giggling now. 'Dr
McCarron, when will I begin to show?'
'Not until August, I should guess. September, if you choose garments
which are uh, voluminous.'
Thank you.' She picked up her purse but did not rise immediately to go. I
thought that she wanted to talk and didn't know where or how to begin.
'You're a working woman, I take it?'
She nodded. 'Yes. I work.'
'Might I ask where? If you'd rather I didn't -'
She laughed- a brittle, humourless laugh, as different from that giggle as
day is from dark. 'In a department store. Where else does an unmarried
woman work in the city? I sell perfume to fat ladies who rinse their hair and
then have it done up in tiny finger-waves.'
'How long will you continue?'
'Until my delicate condition is noticed. I suppose then I'll be asked to
leave, lest I upset any of the fat ladies. The shock of being waited on by a
pregnant woman with no wedding-band might cause their hair to straighten.'
Quite suddenly her eyes were bright with tears. Her lips began to
tremble, and I groped for a handkerchief. But the tears didn't fall-not so
much as a single one. Her eyes brimmed for a moment and then she blinked
them back. Her lips tightened and then smoothed out. She simply decided
she was not going to lose control of her emotions and she did not. It was a
remarkable thing to watch.
'I'm sorry,' she said. 'You've been very kind to me. I won't repay your
kindness with what would be a very common story.'
She rose to go, and I rose with her.
'I'm not a bad listener,' I said, 'and I have some time. My next patient
cancelled.'
'No,' she said. 'Thank you, but no.'
'All right,' I said. 'But there's something else.'
'Yes?'
'It's not my policy to make my patients-any of my patients-pay for
services in advance of those services being rendered. I hope if you that is,
if you feel you'd like to or have to' I fumbled my way into silence.
I've been in New York four years, Dr McCarron, and I'm thrifty by
nature. After August-or September-I'll have to live on what's in my savings
account until I can go back to work again. It's not a great amount and
sometimes, during the nights, mostly, I become frightened.'
She looked at me steadily with those wonderful hazel eyes.
'It seemed better to me-safer-to pay for the baby first. Ahead of
everything. Because that is where the baby is in my thoughts, and because,
later on, the temptation to spend that money might become very great'
'All right,' I said. 'But please remember that I see it as having been paid
before accounts.
If you need it, say so.'
'And bring out the dragon in Mrs Davidson again?' The impish light was
back in her eyes.
'I don't think so. And now, Doctor-'
'You intend to work as long as possible? Absolutely as long as possible?'
'Yes. I have to. Why?'
'I think I'm going to frighten you a little before you go,' I said.
Her eyes widened slightly. 'Don't do that,' she said. 'I'm frightened
enough already.'
'Which is exactly why I'm going to do it Sit down again, Miss Stansfield.'
And when she only stood there, I added: 'Please.'
She sat. Reluctantly.
'You're in a unique and unenviable position,' I told her, leaning back
against the examination table. 'You are dealing with the situation with
remarkable grace.'
She began to speak, and I held up my hand to silence her.
'That's good. I salute you for it But I would hate to see you hurt your
baby in any way out of concern for your own financial security. I had a
patient who, in spite of my strenuous advice to the contrary, continued
packing herself into a girdle month after month, strapping it tighter and
tighter as her pregnancy progressed. She was a vain, stupid, tiresome
woman, and I don't believe she really wanted the baby anyway. I don't
subscribe to many of these theories of the subconscious which everyone
seems to discuss over the Man-Jong boards these days, but if I did, I would
say that she-or some part of her-was trying to kill the baby.'
'And did she?' Her face was very still.
'No, not at all. But the baby was born retarded. It's very possible that the
baby would have been born retarded anyway, and I'm not saying otherwise-
we know next to nothing about what causes such things. But she may have
caused it.'
'I take your point,' she said in a low voice. 'You don't want me to to
pack myself in so I can work another month or six weeks. I'll admit the
thought had crossed my mind. So thank you for the fright.'
This time I walked her to the door. I would have liked to ask her just how
much-or how little-she had left in that savings book, and just how close to
the edge she was. It was a question she would not answer; I knew that well
enough. So I merely bade her goodbye and made a joke about her vitamins.
She left I found myself thinking about her at odd moments over the next
month, and-Johanssen interrupted McCarron's story at this point. They were
old friends, and I suppose that gave him the right to ask the question that
had surely crossed all our minds.
'Did you love her, Emlyn? Is that what all this is about, this stuff about
her eyes and smile and how you "thought of her at odd moments"?'
I thought that McCarron might be annoyed at this interruption, but he
was not. 'You have a right to ask the question,' he said, and paused, looking
into the fire. It seemed that he might almost have fallen into a doze. Then a
dry knot of wood exploded, sending sparks up the chimney in a swirl, and
McCarron looked around, first at Johanssen and then at the rest of us.
'No. I didn't love her. The things I've said about her sound like the things
a man who is falling in love would notice-her eyes, her dresses, her laugh.'
He lit his pipe with a special boltlike pipe-lighter that he carried, drawing
the flame until there was a bed of coals there. Then he snapped the bolt
shut, dropped it into the pocket of his jacket, and blew out a plume of
smoke that shifted slowly around his head in an aromatic membrane.
'I admired her. That was the long and short of it. And my admiration
grew with each of her visits. I suppose some of you sense this as a story of
love crossed by circumstance.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Her story came out a bit at a
time over the next half-year or so, and when you gentlemen hear it, I think
you'll agree that it was every bit as common as she herself said it was. She
had been drawn to the city like a thousand other girls; she had come from a
small town
in Iowa or Nebraska. Or possibly it was Minnesota-I don't really
remember anymore.
She had done a lot of high school dramatics and community theatre in her
small town-good reviews in the local weekly written by a drama critic with
an English degree from Cow and Sileage Junior College-and she came to
New York to try a career in acting.
She was practical even about that-as practical as an impractical ambition
will allow one to be, anyway. She came to New York, she told me, because
she didn't believe the unstated thesis of the movie magazines-that any girl
who came to Hollywood could become a star, that she might be sipping a
soda in Schwab's Drug Store one day and playing opposite Gable or
MacMurray the next. She came to New York, she said, because she thought
it might be easier to get her foot in the door there and, I think, because the
legitimate theatre interested her more than the talkies.
She got a job selling perfume in one of the big department stores and
enrolled in acting classes. She was smart and terribly determined, this girl-
her will was pure steel, through and through-but she was as human as
anyone else. She was lonely, too. Lonely in a way that perhaps only single
girls fresh from small midwestern towns know. Homesickness is not always
a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the
way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen
blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the
way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just
indifferent but ugly perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real
sickness-the ache of the uprooted plant. Miss Stansfield, admirable as she
may have been, determined as she may have been, was not immune to it
And the rest follows so naturally it needs no telling. There was a young man
in her acting classes. The two of them went out several times. She did not
love him, but she needed a friend. By the time she discovered he was not
that and never would be, there had been two incidents. Sexual incidents.
She discovered she was pregnant. She told the young man, who told her he
would stand by her and 'do the decent thing'. A week later he was gone
from his lodgings, leaving no forwarding address. That was when she came
to me.
During her fourth month, I introduced Miss Stansfield to the Breathing
Method-what is today called the Lamaze Method. In those days, you
understand, Monsieur Lamaze was yet to be heard from.
'In those days'-the phrase has cropped up again and again, I notice. I
apologize for it but am unable to help it-so much of what I have told you
and will tell you happened as it did because it happened 'in those days'.
So 'in those days', over forty-five years ago, a visit to the delivery
rooms in any large American hospital would have sounded to you like a
visit to a madhouse. Women weeping wildly, women screaming that they
wished they were dead, women screaming that they could not bear such
agony, women screaming for Christ to forgive them their sins, women
screaming out strings of curses and gutter-words their husbands and fathers
never would have believed they knew. All of this was quite the accepted
thing, in spite of the fact that most of the world's women give birth in
almost complete silence, aside from the grunting sounds of strain that we
would associate with any piece of hard physical labour.
Doctors were responsible for some of this hysteria, I'm sorry to say. The
stories the pregnant woman heard from friends and relatives who had
already been through the birthing process also contributed to it. Believe me:
if you are told that some experience is going to hurt, it will hurt. Most pain
is in the mind, and when a woman absorbs the idea that the act of giving
birth is excruciatingly painful-when she gets this information from her
mother, her sisters, her married friends, and her physician-that woman has
been mentally prepared to feel great agony.
Even after only six years' practice, I had become used to seeing women
who were trying to cope with a twofold problem: not just the fact that they
were pregnant and must plan for the new arrival, but also the fact-what
most of them saw as a fact, anyway-that they had entered the valley of the
shadow of death. Many were actually trying to put their affairs in coherent
order so that if they should die, their husbands would be able to carry on
without them.
This is neither the time nor place for a lesson on obstetrics, but you
should know that for a long time before 'those days', the act of giving birth
was extremely dangerous in the Western countries. A revolution in medical
procedure, beginning around 1900, had made the process much safer, but an
absurdly small number of doctors bothered to tell their expectant mothers
that. God knows why. But in light of this, is it any wonder that most
delivery rooms sounded like Ward Nine in Bellevue? Here are these poor
women, their time come round at last, experiencing a process which has,
because of the almost Victorian decorum of the times, been described to
them only in the vaguest of terms; here are these women experiencing that
engine of birth finally running at full power. They were seized with an awe
and wonder which they immediately interpreted as insupportable pain, and
most of them felt that they would very shortly die a dog's death. In the
course of my reading on the subject of pregnancy, I discovered the principle
of the silent birth and the idea of the Breathing Method. Screaming wastes
energy which would be better used to expel the baby, it causes the women
to hyperventilate, and hyperventilation puts the body on an emergency
basis-adrenals running full blast, respiration and pulse-rate up-that is really
unnecessary. The Breathing Method was supposed to help the mother focus
her attention on the job at hand and to cope with pain by utilizing the body's
own resources.
It was used widely at that time in India and Africa; in America, the
Shoshone, Kiowa, and Micmac Indians all used it; the Eskimos have always
used it; but, as you may guess, most Western doctors had little interest in it.
One of my colleagues-an intelligent man -returned the typescript of my
pregnancy pamphlet to me in the fall of 1931 with a red line drawn through
the entire section on the Breathing Method. In the margin he had scribbled
that if he wanted to know about 'nigger superstitions', he would stop by a
newsstand and buy an issue of Weird Tales!
Well, I didn't cut the section from the pamphlet as he had suggested, but I
had mixed results with the method-that was the best one could say. There
were women who used it with great success. There were others who seemed
to grasp the idea perfectly in principle but who lost their discipline
completely as soon as their contractions became deep and heavy. In most of
those cases I found that the entire idea had been subverted and undermined
by well-meaning friends and relatives who had never heard of such a thing
and thus could not believe it would actually work.
The method was based on the idea that, while no two labours are ever the
same in their specifics, all are pretty much alike in general. There are four
stages: contractive labour, mid-labour, birth, and the expulsion of the
afterbirth. Contractions are a complete hardening of the abdominal and
pelvic-area muscles, and the expectant mother often finds them beginning
in the sixth month. Many women pregnant for the first time expect
something rather nasty, like bowel cramps, but I'm told it's much cleaner- a
strongly physical sensation, which may deepen into a pain like a charley
horse. A woman employing the Breathing Method began to breathe in a
series of short, measured inhales and exhales when she felt a contraction
coming on. Each breath was expelled in a puff, as if one were blowing a
trumpet Dizzy Gillespie fashion.
During mid-labour, when more painful contractions begin coming every
fifteen minutes or so, the woman switched to long inhales followed by long
exhales-it's the way a marathon runner breathes when he's starting his final
kick. The harder the contraction, the longer the inhale-exhale. In my
pamphlet, I called this stage 'riding the waves'. The final stage we need
concern ourselves with here I called 'locomotive', and Lamaze instructors
today frequently call it the 'choo-choo' stage of breathing. Final labour is
accompanied by pains which are most frequently described as deep and
glassy. They are accompanied by an irresistible urge on the mother's part to
push to expel the baby. This is the point, gentlemen, at which that
wonderful, frightening engine reaches its absolute crescendo. The cervix is
fully dilated. The baby has begun its short journey down the birth canal, and
if you were to look directly between the mother's legs, you would be apt to
see the baby's fontanell pulsing only inches from the open air. The mother
using the Breathing Method now begins to take and let out short, sharp
breaths between her lips, not filling her lungs, not hyperventilating, but
almost panting in a perfectly controlled fashion. It really is the sound
children make when they are imitating a steam-driven locomotive.
All of this has a salutary effect on the body-the mother's oxygen is kept
high without putting her systems on an emergency basis, and she herself
remains aware and alert, able to ask and answer questions, able to take
instructions. But of course the mental results of the Breathing Method were
even more important. The mother felt she was actively participating in the
birth of her child-that she was in some part guiding the process. She felt on
top of the experience and on top of the pain.
You can understand that the whole process was utterly dependent on the
patient's state of mind. The Breathing Method was uniquely vulnerable,
uniquely delicate, and if I had a good many failures, I'd explain them this
way-what a patient can be convinced of by her doctor she may be
unconvinced of by relatives who raise their hands in horror when told of
such a heathenish practice.
From this aspect, at least, Miss Stansfield was the ideal patient She had
neither friends nor relatives to talk her out of her belief in the Breathing
Method (although, in all fairness, I must add that I doubt anyone ever talked
her out of anything once she had made up her mind on the subject) once she
came to believe in it. And she did come to believe in it 'It's a little like self-
hypnosis, isn't it?' she asked me the first time we really discussed it I
agreed, delighted. 'Exactly! But you mustn't let that make you think it's a
trick, or that it will let you down when the going gets tough.'
'I don't think that at all. I'm very grateful to you. I'll practise assiduously,
Dr McCarron.'
She was the sort of woman the Breathing Method was invented for, and
when she told me she would practise, she spoke nothing but the truth. I
have never seen anyone embrace an idea with such enthusiasm but, of
course, the Breathing Method was uniquely suited to her temperament
There are docile men and women in this world by the millions, and some of
them are damn fine people. But there are others whose hands ache to hold
the throttles of their own lives, and Miss Stansfield was one of those.
When I say she embraced the Breathing Method totally, I mean it and I
think the story of her final day at the department store where she sold
perfumes and cosmetics proves the point. The end of her gainful
employment finally came late in August. Miss Stansfield was a slim young
woman in fine physical condition, and this was, of course, her first child.
Any doctor will tell you that such a woman is apt not to 'show' for five,
perhaps even six months and then, one day and all at once, everything will
show.
She came in for her monthly checkup on the first of September, laughed
ruefully, and told me she had discovered the Breathing Method had another
use.
'What's that?' I asked her.
'It's even better than counting to ten when you're mad as hell at someone,'
she said. Those hazel eyes were dancing. 'Although people look at you as if
you might be a lunatic when you start puffing and blowing.'
She told me the tale readily enough. She had gone to work as usual on
the previous Monday, and all I can think is that the curiously abrupt
transition from a slim young woman to an obviously pregnant young
woman-and the transition really can be almost as sudden as day to dark in
the tropics -had happened over the weekend. Or maybe her supervisor
finally decided that her suspicions were no longer just suspicions.
'I'll want to see you in the office on your break,' this woman, a Mrs Kelly,
said
coldly.
She had previously been quite friendly to Miss Stansfield. She had shown
her pictures of her two children, both in high school, and they had
exchanged recipes at one point. Mrs Kelly was always asking her if she had
met 'a nice boy' yet. That kindliness and friendliness was gone now. And
when she stepped into Mrs Kelly's office on her break, Miss Stansfield told
me, she knew what to expect.
'You're in trouble,' this previously kind woman said curtly.
'Yes,' Miss Stansfield said. 'It's called that by some people.'
Mrs Kelly's cheeks had gone the colour of old brick. 'Don't you be smart
with me, young woman,' she said. 'From the looks of your belly, you've
been too smart by half already.'
I could see the two of them in my mind's eye as she told me the story-
Miss Stansfield, her direct hazel eyes fixed on Mrs Kelly, perfectly
composed, refusing to drop her eyes, or weep, or exhibit shame in any other
way. I believe she had a much more practical conception of the trouble she
was in than her supervisor did, with her two almost grown children and her
respectable husband, who owned his own barbershop and voted Republican.
'I must say you show remarkably little shame at the way you've deceived
me!' Mrs Kelly burst out bitterly.
'I have never deceived you. No mention of my pregnancy has been made
until today.' She looked at Mrs Kelly almost curiously. 'How can you say I
have deceived you?'
'I took you home!' Mrs Kelly cried. 'I had you to dinner with my sons.'
She looked at Miss Stansfield with utter loathing.
This is when Miss Stansfield began to grow angry. Angrier, she told me,
than she had ever been in her life. She had not been unaware of the sort of
reaction she could expect when the secret came out, but as any one of you
gentlemen will attest, the difference between academic theory and practical
application can sometimes be shockingly huge.
Clutching her hands firmly together in her lap, Miss Stansfield said: 'If
you are suggesting I made or ever would make any attempt to seduce your
sons, that's the dirtiest, filthiest thing I've ever heard in my life.'
Mrs Kelly's head rocked back as if she had been slapped. That bricky
colour drained from her cheeks, leaving only two small spots of hectic
colour. The two women looked grimly at each other across a desk littered
with perfume samples in a room that smelled vaguely of flowers. It was a
moment, Miss Stansfield said, that seemed much longer than it actually
could have been.
Then Mrs Kelly yanked open one of her drawers and brought out a buff-
coloured cheque.
A bright pink severance slip was attached to it. Showing her teeth,
actually seeming to bite off each word, she said, 'With hundreds of decent
girls looking for work in this city, I hardly think we need a strumpet such as
yourself in our employ, dear.'
She told me it was that final, contemptuous 'dear' that brought all her
anger to a sudden head. A moment later Mrs Kelly's jaw dropped and her
eyes widened as Miss Stansfield, her hands locked together as tightly as
links in a steel chain, so tightly she left bruises on herself (they were fading
but still perfectly visible when I saw her on 1 September), began to
'locomotive' between her clenched teeth.
It wasn't a funny story, perhaps, but I burst out laughing at the image and
Miss Stansfield joined me. Mrs Davidson looked in-to make sure we hadn't
gotten into the nitrous oxide, perhaps-and then left again.
'It was all I could think to do,' Miss Stansfield said, still laughing and
wiping her streaming eyes with her handkerchief. 'Because at that moment,
I saw myself reaching out and simply sweeping those sample bottles of
perfume-every one of them-off her desk and onto the floor, which was
uncarpeted concrete. I didn't just think it, I saw it! I saw them crashing to
the floor and filling the room with such a God-awful mixed stench that the
fumigators would have to come.
'I was going to do it; nothing was going to stop me doing it. Then I began
to Breathe, and everything was all right. I was able to take the cheque, and
the pink slip, and get up, and get out. I wasn't able to thank her, of course- I
was still being a locomotive"
We laughed again, and then she sobered.
'It's all passed off now, and I am even able to feel a little sorry for her-or
does that sound like a terribly stiff-necked thing to say?'
'Not at all. I think it's an admirable way to be able to feel.'
'May I show you something I bought with my severance pay, Dr
McCarron?'
'Yes, if you like.'
She opened her purse and took out a small flat box. 'I bought it at a
pawnshop,' she said.
'For two dollars. And it's the only time during this whole nightmare that
I've felt ashamed and dirty. Isn't that strange?'
She opened the box and laid it on my desk so I could look inside. I wasn't
surprised at what I saw. It was a plain gold wedding ring.
'I'll do what's necessary,' she said. 'I am staying in what Mrs Kelly would
undoubtedly call "a respectable boarding house". My landlady has been
kind and friendly but Mrs Kelly was kind and friendly, too. I think she
may ask me to leave at any time now, and I suspect that if I say anything
about the rent-balance due me, or the damage deposit I paid when I moved
in, she'll laugh in my face.'
'My dear young woman, that would be quite illegal. There are courts and
lawyers to help you answer such -'
The courts are men's clubs,' she said steadily, 'and not apt to go out of
their way to befriend a woman in my position. Perhaps I could get my
money back, perhaps not.
Either way, the expense and the trouble and the the unpleasantness
hardly seem worth the forty-seven dollars or so. I had no business
mentioning it to you in the first place. It hasn't happened yet, and maybe it
won't. But in any case, I intend to be practical from now on.'
She raised her head, and her eyes flashed at mine.
'I've got my eye on a place down in the Village-just in case. It's on the
third floor, but it's clean, and it's five dollars a month cheaper than where
I'm staying now.' She picked the ring out of the box. 'I wore this when the
landlady showed me the room.'
She put it on the third finger of her left hand with a small moue of disgust
of which I believe she was unaware. There. Now I'm Mrs Stansfield. My
husband was a truck-driver who was killed on the Pittsburgh-New York run.
Very sad. But I am no longer a little roundheels strumpet, and my child is
no longer a bastard.'
She looked up at me, and the tears were in her eyes again. As I watched,
one of them overspilled and rolled down her cheek.
'Please,' I said, distressed, and reached across the desk to take her hand. It
was very, very cold. 'Don't, my dear.'
She turned her hand-it was the left-over in my hand and looked at the
ring. She smiled, and that smile was as bitter as gall and vinegar, gentlemen.
Another tear fell-just that one.
'When I hear cynics say that the days of magic and miracles are all
behind us, Dr McCarron, I'll know they're deluded, won't I? When you can
buy a ring in a pawnshop for a dollar and a half and that ring will instantly
erase both bastardy and licentiousness, what else would you call that but
magic? Cheap magic.'
'Miss Stansfield Sandra, if I may if you need help, if there's anything I
can
do -'
She drew her hand away from me-if I had taken her right hand instead of
her left, perhaps she would not have done. I did not love her, I've told you,
but in that moment I could have loved her; I was on the verge of falling in
love with her. Perhaps, if I'd taken her right hand instead of the one with
that lying ring on it, and if she had allowed me to hold her hand only a little
longer, until my own warmed it, perhaps then I should have.
'You're a good, kind man, and you've done a great deal for me and my
baby and your Breathing Method is a much better kind of magic than this
awful ring. After all, it kept me from being jailed on charges of wilful
destruction, didn't it?'
She left soon after that, and I went to the window to watch her move off
down the street towards Madison Avenue. God, I admired her just then: She
looked so slight, so young, and so obviously pregnant-but there was still
nothing timid or tentative about her. She did not scutter up the street; she
walked as if she had every right to her place on the sidewalk.
She left my view and I turned back to my desk. As I did so, the framed
photograph which hung on the wall next to my diploma caught my eye, and
a terrible shudder worked through me. My skin-all of it, even the skin on
my forehead and the backs of my hands-crawled up into cold knots of
gooseflesh. The most suffocating fear of my entire life fell on me like a
horrible shroud, and I found myself gasping for breath. It was a
precognitive interlude, gentlemen. I do not take part in arguments about
whether or not such things can occur; I know they can, because it has
happened to me. Just that once, on that hot early September afternoon. I
pray to God I never have another.
The photograph had been taken by my mother on the day I finished
medical school. It showed me standing in front of White Memorial, hands
behind my back, grinning like a kid who's just gotten a full-day pass to the
rides at Palisades Park. To my left the statue of Harriet White can be seen,
and although the photograph cuts her off at about mid-shin, the pedestal and
that queerly heartless inscription-There is no comfort without pain; thus we
define salvation through suffering-could be clearly seen. It was at the foot
of the statue of my grandfather's first wife, directly below that inscription,
that Sandra Stansfield died not quite four months later in a senseless
accident that occurred just as she arrived at the hospital to deliver her child.
She exhibited some anxiety that fall that I would not be there to attend
her during her labour-that I would be away for the Christmas holidays or
not on call. She was partly afraid that she would be delivered by some
doctor who would ignore her wish to use the Breathing Method and who
would instead give her gas or a spinal block. I assured her as best I could. I
had no reason to leave the city, no family to visit over the holidays. My
mother had died two years before, and there was no one else except a
maiden aunt in California and the train didn't agree with me, I told Miss
Stansfield. 'Are you ever lonely?' she asked.
'Sometimes. Usually I keep too busy. Now, take this.' I jotted my home
telephone number on a card and gave it to her. 'If you get the answering
service when your labour begins, call me here.'
'Oh, no, I couldn't-'
'Do you want to use the Breathing Method, or do you want to get some
sawbones who'll think you're mad and give you a capful of ether as soon as
you start to "locomotive"?' She smiled a little. 'All right. I'm convinced.'
But as the autumn progressed and the butchers on 3rd Avenue began
advertising the per-pound price of their 'young and succulent Toms', it
became clear that her mind was still not at rest She had indeed been asked
to leave the place where she had been living when I first met her, and had
moved to the Village. But that, at least, had turned out quite well for her.
She had even found work of a sort. A blind woman with a fairly
comfortable income had hired her to come in twice a week, do some light
housework, and then to read to her from the works of Jean Stratton-Porter
and Pearl Buck. She had taken on that blooming, rosy look that most
healthy women come to have during the final trimester of their pregnancies.
But there was a shadow on her face. I would speak to her and she would be
slow to answer and once, when she didn't answer at all, I looked up from
the notes I was making and saw her looking at the framed photograph next
to my diploma with a strange, dreamy expression in her eyes. I felt a
recurrence of that chill and her response, which had nothing to do with my
question, hardly made me feel easier. 'I have a feeling, Dr McCarron,
sometimes quite a strong feeling, that I am doomed.' Silly, melodramatic
word! And yet, gentlemen, the response that rose to my own lips was this:
Yes; I feel that, too. I bit it off, of course; a doctor who would say such a
thing should immediately put his instruments and medical books up for sale
and investigate his future in the plumbing or carpentry business.
I told her that she was not the first pregnant woman to have such feelings,
and would not be the last. I told her that the feeling was indeed so common
that doctors knew it by the tongue-in-cheek name of The Valley of the
Shadow Syndrome. I've already mentioned it tonight, I believe.
Miss Stansfield nodded with perfect seriousness, and I remember how
young she looked that day, and how large her belly seemed. 'I know about
that,' she said. 'I've felt it. But it's quite separate from this other feeling. This
other feeling is like like something looming up. I can't describe it any
better than that. It's silly, but I can't shake it.'
'You must try,' I said. 'It isn't good for the -'
But she had drifted away from me. She was looking at the photograph
again. 'Who is that?'
'Emlyn McCarron,' I said, trying to make a joke. It sounded
extraordinarily feeble. 'Back before the Civil War, when he was quite
young.'
'No, I recognized you, of course,' she said. "The woman. Who is the
woman?'
'Her name is Harriet White,' I said, and thought: And hers will be the first
face you see when you arrive to deliver your child. The chill came back-that
dreadful drifting formless chill. Her stone face.
'And what does it say there at the base of the statue?' she asked, her eyes
still dreamy, almost trancelike.
'I don't know,' I lied. 'My conversational Latin is not that good.'
That night I had the worst dream of my entire life -I woke up from it in
utter terror, and if I had been married, I suppose I would have frightened my
poor wife to death.
In the dream I opened the door to my consulting room and found Sandra
Stansfield in there. She was wearing the brown pumps, the smart white
linen dress with the brown edging, and the slightly out-of-date cloche hat.
But the hat was between her breasts, because she was carrying her head in
her arms. The white linen was stained and streaked with gore. Blood jetted
from her neck and splattered the ceiling.
And then her eyes fluttered open-those wonderful hazel eyes-and they
fixed on mine.
'Doomed,' the speaking head told me. 'Doomed. I'm doomed. There's no
salvation without suffering. It's cheap magic, but it's all we have.'
That's when I woke up screaming: Her due date of 10 December came
and went. I examined her on 17 December and suggested that, while the
baby would almost certainly be born in 1935, I no longer expected the child
to put in his or her appearance until after Christmas. Miss Stansfield
accepted this with good grace. She seemed to have thrown off the shadow
that had hung over her that fall. Mrs Gibbs, the blind woman who had hired
her to read aloud and do light housework, was impressed with her-
impressed enough to tell her friends about the brave young widow who, in
spite of her recent bereavement and delicate condition, was facing her own
future with such determined good cheer. Several of the blind woman's
friends had expressed an interest in employing her following the birth of her
child.
'I'll take them up on it, too,' she told me. 'For the baby. But only until I'm
on my feet again, and able to find something steady. Sometimes I think the
worst part of this -of everything that's happened-is that it's changed the way
I look at people. Sometimes I think to myself, "How can you sleep at night,
knowing that you've deceived that dear old thing?" and then I think, "If she
knew, she'd show you the door, just like all the others."
Either way, it's a lie, and I feel the weight of it on my heart sometimes.'
Before she left that day, she took a small, gaily wrapped package from
her purse and slid it shyly across the desk to me. 'Merry Christmas, Dr
McCarron.'
'You shouldn't have,' I said, sliding open a drawer and taking out a
package of my own.
'But since I did, too -'
She looked at me for a moment, surprised and then we laughed
together. She had gotten me a silver tie-clasp with the medical symbol on it.
I had gotten her an album in which to keep photographs of her baby. I still
have the tie-clasp. What happened to the album, I cannot say.
I saw her to the door, and as we reached it, she turned to me, put her
hands on my shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and kissed me on the mouth. Her
lips were cool and firm. It was not a passionate kiss, gentlemen, but neither
was it the sort of kiss you might expect from a sister or an aunt.
'Thank you again, Dr McCarron,' she said a little breathlessly. The colour
was high in her cheeks and her hazel eyes glowed lustrously. 'Thank you for
so much.'
I laughed-a little uneasily. 'You speak as if we'll never meet again,
Sandra.' It was, I believe, the second and last time I ever used her Christian
name.
'Oh, we'll meet again,' she said. 'I don't doubt it a bit.'
And she was right-although neither of us could have foreseen the
dreadful cricumstances of that last meeting.
Sandra Stansfield's labour began on Christmas Eve, at just past six p. m.
By that time, the snow which had fallen all that day had changed to sleet.
And by the time Miss Stansfield entered mid-labour, not quite two hours
later, the city streets were a dangerous glaze of ice.
Mrs Gibbs, the blind woman, had a large and spacious first-floor
apartment, and at 6:30 p. m. Miss Stansfield worked her way carefully
downstairs, knocked at her door, was admitted, and asked if she might use
the telephone to call a cab.
'Is it the baby, dear?' Mrs Gibbs asked, fluttering already.
'Yes. The labour's only begun, but I can't chance the weather. It will take
a cab a long time.'
She made that call and then called me. At that time, 6:40, the pains were
coming at intervals of about twenty-five minutes. She repeated to me that
she had begun everything early because of the foul weather. 'I'd rather not
have my child in the back of a Yellow,' she said. She sounded
extraordinarily calm.
The cab was late and Miss Stansfield's labour was progressing more
rapidly than I would have predicted-but as I have said, no two labours are
alike in their specifics. The driver, seeing that his fare was about to have a
baby, helped her down the slick steps, constantly adjuring her to 'be careful,
lady'. Miss Stansfield only nodded, preoccupied with her deep inhale-
exhales as a fresh contraction seized her. Sleet ticked off streetlights and the
roofs of cars; it melted in large, magnifying drops on the taxi's yellow
dome-light. Miss Gibbs told me later that the young cab driver was more
nervous than her 'poor, dear Sandra', and that was probably a contributing
cause to the accident.
Another was almost certainly the Breathing Method itself.
The driver threaded his hack through the slippery streets, working his
way slowly past the fender-benders and inching through the clogged
intersections, slowly closing on the hospital. He was not seriously injured in
the accident, and I talked to him in the hospital.
He said the sound of the steady deep breathing coming from the back seat
made him nervous; he kept looking in the rear view mirror to see if she was
'dine or sumpin'. He said he would have felt less nervous if she had let out a
few healthy bellows, the way a woman in labour was supposed to do. He
asked her once or twice if she was feeling all right and she only nodded,
continuing to 'ride the waves' in deep inhales and exhales.
Two or three blocks from the hospital, she must have felt the onset of
labour's final stage.
An hour had passed since she had entered the cab-the traffic was that
snarled-but this was still an extraordinarily fast labour for a woman having
her first baby. The driver noticed the change in the way she was breathing.
'She started pantin' like a dog on a hot day, Doc,' he told me. She had begun
to 'locomotive'.
At almost the same time the cabbie saw a hole open up in the crawling
cross-traffic and shot through it The way to White Memorial was now open.
It was less than three blocks ahead. 'I could see the statue of that broad,' he
said. Eager to be rid of his
panting, pregnant passenger, he stepped down on the gas again and the
cab leaped forward, wheels spinning over the ice with little or no traction.
I had walked to the hospital, and my arrival coincided with the cab's
arrival only because I had underestimated just how bad driving conditions
had become. I believed I would find her upstairs, a legally admitted patient
with all her papers signed, her prep completed, working her way steadily
through her mid-labour. I was mounting the steps when I saw the sudden
sharp convergence of two sets of headlights reflected from the patch of ice
where the janitors hadn't yet spread cinders. I turned just in time to see it
happen.
An ambulance was nosing its way out of the Emergency Wing rampway
as Miss Stansfield's cab came across the Square and towards the hospital.
The cab was simply going too fast to stop. The cabbie panicked and
stamped down on the brake-pedal rather than pumping it. The cab slid, then
began to turn broadside. The pulsing dome-light of the ambulance threw
moving stripes and blotches of blood-coloured light over the scene, and,
freakishly, one of these illuminated the face of Sandra Stansfield. For that
one moment it was the face in my dream, the same bloody, open-eyed face
that I had seen on her severed head.
I cried out her name, took two steps down, slipped, and fell sprawling. I
cracked my elbow a paralyzing blow but somehow managed to hold on to
my black bag. I saw the rest of what happened from where I lay, head
ringing, elbow smarting. The ambulance braked, and it also began to
fishtail. Its rear end struck the base of the statue. The loading doors flew
open. A stretcher, mercifully empty, shot out like a tongue and then crashed
upside down in the street with its wheels spinning. A young woman on the
sidewalk screamed as the two vehicles approached each other and tried to
run. Her feet went out from under her after two strides and she fell on her
stomach. Her purse flew out of her hand and shot down the icy sidewalk
like a weight in a pinball bowling game. The cab swung all the way around,
now travelling backwards, and I could see the cabbie clearly. He was
spinning his wheel madly, like a kid in a Dodgem Car. The ambulance
rebounded from Mrs White's statue at an angle and smashed broadside
into the cab. The taxi spun around once in a tight circle and was slammed
against the base of the statue with fearful force. Its yellow light, the letters
ON RADIO CALL still flashing, exploded like a bomb. The left side of the
cab crumpled like tissue-paper. A moment later I saw that it was not just the
left side; the cab had struck an angle of the pedestal hard enough to tear it in
two. Glass sprayed onto the slick ice like diamonds. And my patient was
thrown through the rear right-side window of the dismembered cab like a
rag-doll. I was on my feet again without even knowing it. I raced down the
icy steps, slipped again, caught at the railing, and kept on. I was only aware
of Miss Stansfield lying in the uncertain shadow cast by that hideous statue
of Harriet White, some twenty feet from where the ambulance had come to
rest on its side, flasher still strobing the night with red. There was
something terribly wrong with that figure, but I honestly don't believe I
knew what it was until my foot struck something with a heavy enough thud
to almost send me sprawling again. The thing I'd kicked skittered away-like
the young woman's purse, it slid rather than rolled. It skittered away and it
was only the fall of hair-bloodstreaked but still recognizably blonde,
speckled with bits of glass-that made me realize what it was. She had been
decapitated in the accident. What I had kicked into the frozen gutter was her
head.
Moving in total numb shock, now I reached her body and turned it over. I
think I tried to scream as soon as I had done it, as soon as I saw. If I did, no
sound came out; I could not make a sound. The woman was still breathing,
you see,
gentlemen. Her chest was heaving up and down in quick, light, shallow
breaths. Ice pattered down on her open coat and her blood-drenched dress.
And I could hear a high, thin whistling noise. It waxed and waned like a
teakettle which can't quite reach the boil. It was air being pulled into her
severed windpipe and then exhaled again; the little screams of air through
the crude reed of the vocal chords which no longer had a mouth to shape
their sounds. I wanted to run but I had no strength; I fell on my knees beside
her on the ice, one hand cupped to my mouth. A moment later I was aware
of fresh blood seeping through the lower part of her dress-and of movement
there. I became suddenly, frenziedly convinced that there was still a chance
to save the baby.
'Cheap magic!' I roared into the sleet, and I believe that as I yanked her
dress up to her waist I began laughing. I believe I was mad. Her body was
warm. I remember that. I remember the way it heaved with her breathing.
One of the ambulance attendants came up, weaving like a drunk, one hand
clapped to the side of his head. Blood trickled through his fingers.
'Cheap magic!' I screamed again, still laughing, still groping. My hands
had found her fully dilated.
The attendant stared down at Sandra Stansfield's headless body with wide
eyes. I don't know if he realized the corpse was still somehow breathing or
not Perhaps he thought it was merely a thing of the nerves- a kind of final
reflex action. If he did think such a thing, he could not have been driving an
ambulance long. Chickens may walk around for a while with their heads cut
off, but people only twitch once or twice if that 'Stop staring at her and get
me a blanket,' I snapped at him.
He wandered away, but not back towards the ambulance. He was pointed
more or less towards Times Square. He simply walked off into the sleety
night. I have no idea what became of him. I turned back to the dead woman
who was somehow not dead, hesitated a moment, and then stripped off my
overcoat. Then I lifted her hips so I could get it under her. Still I heard that
whistle of breath as her headless body did 'locomotive' breathing. I
sometimes hear it still, gentlemen. In my dreams.
Please understand that all of this had happened in an extremely short
time-it seemed longer to me, but only because my perceptions had been
heightened to a feverish pitch. People were only beginning to run out of the
hospital to see what had happened, and behind me a woman shrieked as she
saw the severed head lying by the edge of the street. I yanked open my
black bag, thanking God I hadn't lost it in my fall, and pulled out a short
scalpel. I opened it, cut through her underwear, and pulled it off. Now the
ambulance driver approached-he came to within fifteen feet of us and then
stopped dead. I glanced over at him, still wanting that blanket. I wasn't
going to get it from him, I saw; he was staring down at the breathing body,
his eyes widening until it seemed they must slip from their orbits and
simply dangle from their optic nerves like grotesque seeing yo-yos. Then he
dropped to his knees and raised his clasped hands. He meant to pray, I am
quite sure of that. The attendant might not have known he was seeing an
impossibility, but this fellow did. The next moment he had fainted dead
away. I had packed forceps in my bag that night; I don't know why. I hadn't
used such things in three years, not since I had seen a doctor I will not name
punch through a newborn's temple and into the child's brain with one of
those infernal gadgets. The child died instantly. The corpse was 'lost' and
what went on the death certificate was stillborn. But, for whatever reason, I
had them.
Miss Stansfield's body tightened down, her belly clenching, turning from
flesh to stone.
And the baby crowned. I saw the crown for just a moment, bloody and
membranous and pulsing. Pulsing. It was alive, at least then. Definitely
alive.
Stone became flesh again. The crown slipped back out of sight. And a
voice behind me said: 'What can I do, Doctor?'
It was a middle-aged nurse, the sort of woman who is so often the
backbone of our profession. Her face was as pale as milk, and while there
was terror and a kind of superstitious awe on her face as she looked down at
that weirdly breathing body, there was none of that dazed shock which
would have made her difficult and dangerous to work with.
'You can get me a blanket, stat,' I said curtly. 'We've still got a chance, I
think.' Behind her I saw perhaps two dozen people from the hospital
standing on the steps, not wanting to come any closer. How much or how
little did they see? I have no way of knowing for sure. All I know is that I
was avoided for days afterwards (and forever by some of them), and no one,
including this nurse, ever spoke to me of it. She now turned and started
back towards the hospital.
'Nurse!' I called. 'No time for that. Get one from the ambulance. This
baby is coming now.'
She changed course, slipping and sliding through the slush in her white
crepe-soled shoes. I turned back to Miss Stansfield.
Rather than slowing down, the locomotive breathing had actually begun
to speed up and then her body turned hard again, locked and straining. The
baby crowned again. I waited for it to slip back but it did not; it simply kept
coming. There was no need for the forceps after all. The baby all but flew
into my hands. I saw the sleet ticking off its naked, bloody body-for it was a
boy, his sex unmistakable. I saw steam rising from it as the black, icy night
snatched away the last of its mother's heat. Its blood-grimed fists waved
feebly; it uttered a thin, wailing cry.
'Nurse!' I bawled, 'move your ass, you bitch!' It was perhaps inexcusable
language, but for a moment I felt I was back in France, that in a few
moments the shells would begin to whistle overhead with a sound like that
remorselessly ticking sleet; the machine-guns would begin their hellish
stutter; the Germans would begin to materialize out of the murk, running
and slipping and cursing and dying in the mud and smoke. Cheap magic, I
thought, seeing the bodies twist and turn and fall. But you're right, Sandra,
it's all we have. It was the closest I have ever come to losing my mind,
gentlemen.
'NURSE, FOR GOD'S SAKE!'
The baby wailed again-such a tiny, lost sound!-and then it wailed no
more. The steam rising from its skin had thinned to ribbons. I put my mouth
against its face, smelling blood and the bland, damp aroma of placenta. I
breathed into its mouth and heard the jerky sussurrus of its breathing
resume. Then the nurse was there, the blanket in her arms.
I held out my hand for it.
She started to give it to me, and then held it back. 'Doctor, what what if
it's a monster? Some kind of monster?'
'Give me that blanket,' I said. 'Give it to me now, Sarge, before I kick
your fucking asshole right up your fucking shoulderblades.'
'Yes, doctor,' she said with perfect calmness (we must bless the women,
gentlemen, who so often understand simply by not trying to), and gave me
the blanket I wrapped the child and gave it to her.
'If you drop him, Sarge, you'll be eating those stripes.'
'Yes, doctor.'
'It's cheap fucking magic, Sarge, but it's all God left us with.'
'Yes, doctor.'
I watched her half-walk, half-run back to the hospital with the child and
watched the crowd on the steps part for her. Then I rose to my feet and
backed away from the body.
Its breathing, like the baby's, hitched and caught stopped hitched
again stopped
I began to back away from it. My foot struck something. I turned. It was
her head. And obeying some directive from outside of me, I dropped to one
knee and turned the head over. The eyes were open-those direct hazel eyes
that had always been full of such life and such determination. They were
full of determination still. Gentlemen, she was seeing me.
Her teeth were clenched, her lips slightly parted. I heard the breath
slipping rapidly back and forth between those lips and through those teeth
as she "locomotived". Her eyes moved; they rolled slightly to the left in
their sockets so as to see me better. Her lips parted. They mouthed four
words: Thank you, Doctor McCarron. And I heard them, gentlemen, but not
from her mouth. They came from twenty feet away. From her vocal cords.
And because her tongue and lips and teeth, all of which we use to shape our
words, were here, they came out only in unformed modulations of sound.
But there were seven of them, seven distinct sounds, just as there are seven
syllables in that phrase, Thank you, Doctor McCarron.
'You're welcome, Miss Stansfield,' I said. 'It's a boy.' Her lips moved
again, and from behind me, thin, ghostly, came the sound hoyyyyyy-Her
eyes lost their focus and their determination. They seemed now to look at
something beyond me, perhaps in that black, sleety sky. Then they closed.
She began to locomotive again and then she simply stopped. Whatever
had happened was now over. The nurse had seen some of it, the ambulance
driver had perhaps seen some of it before he fainted.
But it was over now, over for sure. There was only the remains of an ugly
accident out here and a new baby in there.
I looked up at the statue of Harriet White and there she still stood,
looking stonily away towards the Garden across the way, as if nothing of
any particular note had happened, as if such determination in a world as
hard and as senseless as this one meant nothing or worse still, that it was
perhaps the only thing which meant anything, the only thing that made any
difference at all.
As I recall, I knelt there in the slush before her severed head and began to
weep. As I recall, I was still weeping when an intern and two nurses helped
me to my feet and inside.
McCarron's pipe had gone out.
He relit it with his bolt-lighter while we sat in perfect, breathless silence.
Outside, the wind howled and moaned. He snapped his lighter closed and
looked up. He seemed mildly surprised to find us still there.
'That's all,' he said.' That's the end! What are you waiting for? Chariots of
fire?' He snorted, then seemed to debate for a moment 'I paid her burial
expenses out of my own pocket She had no one else, you see.' He smiled a
little. 'Well there was Ella Davidson, my nurse. She insisted on chipping in
twenty-five dollars, which she could ill afford. But when Davidson insisted
on a thing-' He shrugged, and then laughed a little. 'You're quite sure it
wasn't a reflex?' I heard myself demanding suddenly. 'Are you quite sure -'
'Quite sure,' McCarron said imperturbably. 'The first contraction, perhaps.
But the completion of her labour was not a matter of seconds but of
minutes. And I sometimes think she might have held on even longer, if it
had been necessary. Thank God it was not.'
'What about the baby?' Johanssen asked.
McCarron puffed at his pipe. 'Adopted,' he said. 'And you'll understand
that, even in those days, adoption records were kept as secret as possible.'
'Yes, but what about the baby?' Johanssen asked again, and McCarron
laughed in a cross way.
'You never let go of a thing, do you?' he asked Johanssen.
Johanssen shook his head. 'Some people have learned it to their sorrow.
What about the baby?'
'Well, if you've come with me this far perhaps you'll also understand that
I had a certain vested interest in knowing how it all came out for that child.
Or I felt that I did. There was a young man and his wife-their name was not
Harrison, but that is close enough. They lived in Maine. They could have no
children of their own. They adopted the child and named him well, John's
good enough, isn't it? John will do you fellows, won't it?' He puffed at his
pipe but it had gone out again. I was faintly aware of Stevens hovering
behind me, and knew that somewhere our coats would be at the ready. Soon
we would slip back into them and back into our lives. As McCarron had
said, the tales were done for another year.
The child I delivered that night is now head of the English Department at
one of the two or three most respected private colleges in the country,'
McCarron said. 'He's not forty-five yet. A young man. It's early for him, but
the day may well come when he will be President of that school. I shouldn't
doubt it a bit. He is handsome, intelligent, and charming.
'Once, on a pretext, I was able to dine with him in the private faculty
club. We were four that evening. I said little and so was able to watch him.
He has his mother's determination, gentlemen ' and his mother's hazel
eyes.'
3: The Club
Stevens saw us out as he always did, holding coats, wishing men the
happiest of happy Christmases, thanking them for their generosity. I
contrived to be the last, and Stevens looked at me with no surprise when I
said: 'I have a question I'd like to ask, if you don't mind.'
He smiled a little. 'I suppose you should,' he said, 'Christmas is a fine
time for questions.'
Somewhere down the hallway to our left- a hall I had never been down- a
grandfather clock ticked sonorously, the sound of the age passing away. I
could smell old leather and oiled wood and, much more faintly than either
of these, the smell of Stevens's aftershave.
'But I should warn you,' Stevens added as the wind rose in a gust outside,
'it's better not to ask too much. Not if you want to keep coming here.'
'People have been closed out for asking too much?' Closed out was not
really the phrase I wanted, but it was as close as I could come.
'No,' Stevens said, his voice as low and polite as ever. 'They simply
choose to stay away.'
I returned his gaze, feeling a chill prickle its way up my back-it was as if
a large, cold, invisible hand had been laid on my spine. I found myself
remembering that strangely liquid thump I had heard upstairs one night and
wondered (as I had more than once before) exactly how many rooms there
really were here.
'If you still have a question, Mr Adley, perhaps you'd better ask it. The
evening's almost over -'
'And you have a long train-ride ahead of you?' I asked, but Stevens only
looked at me impassively. 'All right,' I said. There are books in this library
that I can't find anywhere else-not in the New York Public Library, not in
the catalogues of any of the antiquarian book-dealers I've checked with, and
certainly not in Books in Print. The billiard table in the Small Room is a
Nord. I'd never heard of such a brand, and so I called the International
Trademark Commission. They have two Nords-one makes crosscountry
skis and the other makes wooden kitchen accessories. There's a Seafront
jukebox in the Long Room. The ITC has a Seeburg listed, but no Seafront.'
'What is your question, Mr Adley?'
His voice was as mild as ever, but there was something terrible in his
eyes suddenly no; if I am to be truthful, it was not just in his eyes; the
terror I felt had infused the atmosphere all around me. The steady tock-tock
from down the lefthand hall was no longer the pendulum of a grandfather
clock; it was the tapping foot of the executioner as he watches the
condemned led to the scaffold. The smells of oil and leather turned bitter
and menacing, and when the wind rose in another wild whoop, I felt
momentarily sure that the front door would blow open, revealing not 35th
Street but an insane Clark Ashton Smith landscape where the bitter shapes
of twisted trees stood silhouetted on a sterile horizon below. which double
suns were setting in a gruesome red glare.
Oh, he knew what I had meant to ask; I saw it in his grey eyes.
Where do all these things come from? I had meant to ask. Oh, I know
well enough where you come from, Stevens; that accent isn't Dimension X,
it's pure Brooklyn. But where do you go? What has put that timeless look in
your eyes and stamped it on your face? And, Stevens-- where are we
RIGHT THIS SECOND?
But he was waiting for my question.
I opened my mouth. And the question that came out was: 'Are there many
more rooms upstairs?'
'Oh, yes, sir,' he said, his eyes never leaving mine. 'A great many. A man
could become lost In fact, men have become lost. Sometimes it seems to me
that they go on for miles. Rooms and corridors.'
'And entrances and exits?'
His eyebrows went up slightly. 'Oh yes. Entrances and exits.' He waited,
but I had asked enough, I thought -I had come to the very edge of
something that would, perhaps, drive me mad.
"Thank you, Stevens.'
'Of course, sir.' He held out my coat and I slipped into it.
'There will be more tales?'
'Here, sir, there are always more tales.'
That evening was some time ago, and my memory has not improved
between then and now (when a man reaches my age, the opposite is much
more likely to be true), but I remember with perfect clarity the stab of fear
that went through me when Stevens swung the oaken door wide-the cold
certainty that I would see that alien landscape, cracked and hellish in the
bloody light of those double suns, which might set and bring on an
unspeakable darkness of an hour's duration, or ten hours, or ten thousand
years. I cannot explain it, but I tell you that world exists-I am as sure of that
as Emlyn McCarron was sure that the severed head of Sandra Stansfield
went on breathing. I thought for that one timeless second that the door
would open and
Stevens would thrust me out into that world and I would then hear that
door slam shut behind me forever.
Instead, I saw 35th Street and a radio-cab standing at the curb, exhaling
plumes of exhaust. I felt an utter, almost debilitating relief.
'Yes, always more tales,' Stevens repeated. 'Goodnight, sir.' Always more
tales.
Indeed there have been. And, one day soon, perhaps I'll tell you another.
The End
Table of Contents
RITA HAYWORTH AND SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION
APT PUPIL
1
2
3
4
5
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
15
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
THE BODY
1
2
3
5
7
8
9
10
13
14
15
16
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
THE BREATHING METHOD
1: The Club
2: The Breathing Method
3: The Club